visionOS Spatial Design

visionOS 空間デザイン / 2023– / Style / Apple UI

The screen language Apple set out for Vision Pro in its Human Interface Guidelines. A window is an upright plane whose background is a material Apple calls glass, so the room shows through it while specular reflections and shadows report where the plane sits and how big it is. visionOS defines a point as an angle rather than a count of pixels, which keeps a window's apparent size constant as it moves away.

visionOS Spatial Design — visionOS 2 home screen, 2025 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — visionOS 2 home screen, 2025 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 · CC0

visionOS Spatial Design — visionOS 2 with app windows over the real surroundings, 2025 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — visionOS 2 with app windows over the real surroundings, 2025 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 · CC0

visionOS Spatial Design — visionOS 26 Control Center, 2025 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — visionOS 26 Control Center, 2025 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 · CC0

At a glance

Visual cues

An upright plane with a glass background that cannot be swapped out, carrying specular reflections and shadows
A default window of 1280x720 pt, opening about two metres away with an apparent width near three metres
A hover effect that lights only the element being looked at, with one rounded target region per control
Volumes have no visible frame, and their close button and window bar rotate to face whoever walks around them

Best used for

Reworking an iPad layout into a panel that stays legible while floating over a real room
Showing a product model at life size, placed in the room as a frameless volume rather than a window

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Dictionary entry

Type: Use SF Pro, choosing the heavier body and title steps this platform provides. Default to white text and keep the glyphs themselves flat. Labels tied to a point in space should always turn to face the viewer.
Composition: Start from 1280x720 pt and let the content decide the proportion. Leave at least 16 pt of margin around each interactive item and keep centres at least 60 pt apart. Always set a minimum and a maximum window size.
Material: Keep the glass background. Build depth from shadow, specular reflection and colour temperature, never from raised text. Keep any 3D inside a window shallow and move deeper objects into a volume.
Caution: Replacing the glass with an opaque fill breaks the visual relationship between elements, hurts legibility, and makes the window feel heavy because it hides the room behind it.
Further study: the windows and spatial layout sections of the HIG, and what defining a point as an angle does to page design / how the region a hover effect applies to is defined when an image and its caption are bound into one control / the actual apparent size of a 1280x720 pt window placed two metres away

Related entries

Liquid Glass (リキッドガラス)Same Apple UI lineage.Compare visionOS Spatial Design and Liquid Glass
Glassmorphism (グラスモーフィズム)Shared effects: Futurity / Calm.Compare visionOS Spatial Design and Glassmorphism

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