At WWDC23 Apple announced its new Augmented Reality platform, Vision Pro. Given my obsessive note-taking, I immediately began thinking about how this could be a game-changer for managing my notes and journals.

I have previously written about my Apple Notes workflow and how all of our journals and sketchbooks could be ingested into One Column. With Vision Pro, this unified column could actually connect itself to the physical journals.

The arrows indicate that the next page will be appended to the bottom of the column, and all future pages will be further down, while all previous pages will be "lifted" off beyond the top edge of the current page. This continuity is a unique experience that doesn't exist anywhere else as far as I'm aware. (as of writing in June of 2023)

Depending on how high-quality the onboard cameras are, Vision Pro could also be used to scan the journals simply by flipping through pages.

From the Apple.com marketing materials, it appears as though Apple Notes is currently just a floating window. While it looks beautiful, it could be made more immersive and experiential by connecting it to the source materials sitting on your desk.

Further explorations

The above proposal doesn't tell the full story. The following details would still need to be worked out:

• Text / section selection methods

• Gestures / interactions to zoom and scroll, responsive text, smart column wrapping

• Tagging / folders / hierarchies

• Collapsing into different sections (Sources, dates; months, years, etc.,)

• Supercharge notes with AI prompts

  • "elaborate this idea further"

  • "identify potential problems with this idea"

  • "Generate a sketch of this idea"

  • "Convert this sketch to a high fidelity image"

AR / VR Manifesto

Here's to hoping for a positive future where AR / VR is used to unleash human creativity and consciousness (through tools such as this) instead of enslaving us to the endless feed of clickbait content or wasting away playing games.

Games and entertainment are fine in moderation, but our goal as designers and engineers ought to be to make creation more enticing than consumption.

Thoughts? Feedback? Hiring for VR / AR positions? Let's chat.

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