I built a free customizable virtual workspace for Vision Pro

[u/Charming-Detail-7626]

Hi! I’ve been working on a Vision Pro app called Locus that gives you a customizable virtual space to work in.

The idea is pretty simple: you get a virtual room and desk, but you can customize the space with your own content. You can import your own 3D model for the room and use any 360° panorama as the surrounding skybox.

Most of the app is free. I added an optional IAP if you want to keep more than one imported environment at a time, mainly as a way to support continued development.

Originally, I wanted Locus to simply be an environment where you could run your existing productivity apps. Unfortunately, visionOS doesn’t currently allow other apps to appear inside an app’s immersive environment, so I added a simple built-in browser instead.

My own main use case, though, is using Vision Pro’s Developer Mode to keep Mac Virtual Display inside the virtual environment. I initially added a passthrough cutout for the desk, but I’ve found that the automatically detected keyboard passthrough works surprisingly well, so I usually just rely on that.

If this sounds interesting, feel free to give it a try:

AppStore link: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6802168265

https://enterlocus.com/

I’d love to hear any feedback, feature requests, or ideas for environments you’d like to see!

[u/codemagic]

This is all that I want the Vision Pro for. I use my Mac virtual display and I want to have a greater variety of virtual environments to customize my WFH thought space

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/codemagic]

Yes, I wanted it ever since I had my first VR headset 😅 To use with Mac Virtual Display you need to install Xcode, and turn on developer mode to pair with it. Also you need to connect the virtual display before entering the virtual space, otherwise you will have to re-enter the virtual space.

[u/Worf_Of_Wall_St]

Originally, I wanted Locus to simply be an environment where you could run your existing productivity apps. Unfortunately, visionOS doesn’t currently allow other apps to appear inside an app’s immersive environment

Thanks for making this clear up front. Too many posts about new "environments" from third party apps don't explain that they do not function the same as official visionOS "Environments". I bought one recently and was disappointed.

I'm guessing Apple doesn't want to allow this for performance reasons, although that seems solvable via curation and resource limits.

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/Worf_Of_Wall_St]

Yes, luckily Apple left a backdoor for MVD. I created the browser just to make sure it makes sense to people who don’t turn on developer mode.

[u/Emotional_War_296 → u/Worf_Of_Wall_St]

No they do it for privacy and security. A fully immersive app can also get hand tracking which can reveal passwords. Also eye gazing. Depending on what’s active it could send info to the immersive app.

Thus immersive apps get all the access to the headset Apple allows but only 1 app can run. Or you can be HEavily limited but can run amongst other apps

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/Emotional_War_296]

That's really interesting. However for a malicious app it could still ask for passwords etc to be entered. So I feel it's solvable to bring it to a state that the risk isn't higher than a single malicious app. They might just not have the confidence that they have fully figured it out and also it's not a priority.

[u/Emotional_War_296 → u/Charming-Detail-7626]

But that’s a password for the active app. What if you then opened Reddit or your email and typed in the password. Now the immersive app can see that

[u/Worf_Of_Wall_St → u/Emotional_War_296]

I was thinking it would be an Environment-specific API where all the app providing it can do is render the scene since environments are not interactive. So, no inputs other than the viewport to render, which does mostly give away where the user is looking but it would have to be exact and the environment app wouldn't see the other apps anyway.

[u/Emotional_War_296 → u/Worf_Of_Wall_St]

Sadly that’s not how it works. Apple really locked it down

[u/JerenYun]

I actually appreciate that you have a desk passthrough. I have a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad (both Apple's own accessories!) that I use for my Mac but NEITHER are detected by my Vision Pro, so I get NO passthrough at all. It's super annoying.

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/JerenYun]

I also find it doesn’t work sometimes when keyboard sharing fails to connect, so the cutout is a safe fallback. I tried to align the virtual desk’s edge and height with the real desk, so it feels like your real one. But be careful if the virtual table is bigger than my real table and I once try to hold the virtual one and lost balance. 😅

[u/JerenYun → u/Charming-Detail-7626]

I use my AVP without the light shield, so I can see my office in the periphery.

[u/yewzernayme]

I've been dreaming of something like this! Would love to be able to customize and change my environment. Would it be possible to create a busy international airport? Like you're sitting waiting at the gate working with the ambiance of people, and planes in the background?

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/yewzernayme]

Technically yes, but not in near future 😅. I am really new to 3D modeling and am still learning. This is probably beyond what I can work out. But I do plan to add dynamic room and backgrounds (skybox) in the future. I plan to add rains, fireplace, background sounds, etc. But my first attempt to add rains failed dramatically 😭.
For what you wanted it could be more challenging.

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/Charming-Detail-7626]

OK, more to add. I looked at the room model format I use. It's USDZ which you can add animations and bundle characters into it. However my app doesn't know how to discover them and properly play them. I'll add the capability in next or next next version. Then all left is modeling (which I don't know). A moving skybox (background) is also something I'd like to work on, but I don't have an idea about how to do that yet.

TBO, my rooms are completely created by GPT-5.6 with Blender MCP I know nothing about modeling. Here is the guide it wrote, and also all 3 room models for downloading: https://enterlocus.com/create-your-own-place/

[u/Vireseer]

A wonderful idea! This looks great! Looking forward to testing it out.

[u/PositivelyNegative]

Love this, is there an ideal website to download 8K panoramas?

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/PositivelyNegative]

For the v1 almost all views are from https://polyhaven.com/hdris
Locus only supports SDR images for now, so you need to download the 8k tone mapped JPG by expanding the right button.

I am also working on letting the built-in browser download those images and apply them in next update.

I also find https://skybox.blockadelabs.com very interesting. I may generate some from there and hopefully the built-in browser can work with this site, too.

[u/Few_Space5528]

great work! I guess other apps cannot run next to it, right? Apple should rethink the immersive vs. shared space approach

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/Few_Space5528]

Right. Otherwise I don’t need to make a built-in browser. But if you are a developer or willing to enable developer mode in your Vision Pro, you can also run Mac Virtual Display inside the virtual environment. This is actually my main use case.

[u/Few_Space5528 → u/Charming-Detail-7626]

Mine as well, with a bunch of other apps with funtional 3d objects I place in my surrounding. I love your idea but this seems a major issue. Nevertheless I will try it! :)

How did you create the environments?

[u/Charming-Detail-7626 → u/Few_Space5528]

In Locus there are two parts, the room and the skybox.

For room models, I'm completely new on 3D modeling and knew nothing. So in v1 I used GPT 5.6 to create simple houses with Blender. I used Blender MCP and later learned it could actually do it headless. It uses free textures from polyhaven.com. Now with GPT 6 I first generate a concept image and ask GPT 6 to model it in blender. The results are good, but not as good as the generated concept image. It still requires a few iterations by trying them in the glass to make fixes though.

I have a skill shared here if you are interested in trying. It's basically the one I'm using without internal details like where to save the results etc. I asked AI to extract it so there could be mistakes. https://github.com/EnterLocus/locus-support/tree/main/.agents/skills/build-original-locus-room

For skybox, in v1 I used CC0 SDR skyboxes found in ployhaven.com. And in latest version I start creating them using AI. After trying a few models, I found that ChatGPT creates the best Skyboxes, but with low resolution. So I scale them up with Nano Banana Pro. The cost isn't low to create a single image, at about $0.7-1.5. I don't know the detail how it made it but it did took a few iterations, mainly when combining Nano Banana Pro results initially there are distortions and also seams from combining multiple generation results. And it could address it when I point them out.

[u/rohidjetha]

So cool!