This Apple Vision Pro app is already changing fashion design. Here’s how

Apple’s first spatial computer, the Vision Pro, went on sale today. The product aims to be the first to take 3D computing into the mainstream. If you check out Apple’s marketing for the device, you’ll see that the company touts consumer-friendly features: It allows you to experience films as if they’re being shown on a movie theater-size screen, watch 3D recordings of your family, play immersive spatial video games, even meditate more fully.

But plenty of businesses are eager to see how Apple’s Vision Pro can help them as well. One such company is Swatchbook, the maker of a materials marketplace platform that allows designers to view and source materials digitally via an online catalog of more than 150,000 texture scans, renders, and 3D visualizations of myriad materials from leathers to nylon fabrics, which users can use to order instantly from suppliers across the globe. Swatchbook was founded in 2017, and its clients include fashion retailers H&M, Target, Kohl’s, Victoria’s Secret, and Nike, as well as smaller fashion startups. Swatchbook’s online marketplace has solved a major pain point for designers, who previously needed to contact suppliers individually to find and source physical samples of materials they were considering for a project.

Once Swatchbook learned about Apple’s Vision Pro, it saw how the technology could solve another issue for fashion designers. Swatchbook’s engineers built an app called Remix, which helps creatives expedite the often slow and tedious design process. 

Currently, all fashion designs start with a 2D sketch. That sketch is sent to a technical artist who creates a few more sketches of the design, known as a tech pack—usually including the back of the garment and one of its lateral views. Those sketches are sent to a factory, often halfway around the world, where the designer’s original intent gets interpreted, based on the flat sketches, to bring it into the physical world. The factory sends that sample to the designer for approval. This is the first time the designer gets to see their design in actual physical form—and if they don’t like it, the process needs to begin again.

With its new Remix app, coupled with the Apple Vision Pro, Swatchbook believes it can consign this time-consuming process to the dustbin of history. Now, a designer can don a headset to call up their design right in front of their eyes. They can see it life-size, even walk around it, just as if they were walking around a mannequin wearing it. The texture of a leather jacket and the fold of a collar on a cotton shirt have a presence that can’t be rendered on a flat computer screen.

The designer then can reach out to select any element of their garment—a sleeve, the thread used in the seams—to replace with another material or color to see how that looks. No longer needing to wait weeks or months for a physical sample with the changes, the designer gets to see their iterations in the space right before them. They can even “explode” their design so that its individual components scatter outward in front of their eyes—in order to inspect the look and feel of every element down to the smallest stitch.

Before the Apple Vision Pro, this type of immediacy and physicality was unimaginable, even with existing spatial computers on the market. Apple’s “leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else,” on this, Swatchbook founder and CEO Yazan Malkosh told me. “And you need that amount of polish for designers and people who appreciate the design.”

Instead of using joysticks, like other spatial computers, Apple’s Vision Pro “works with your eyes,” Malkosh explains. “It works with your pinches— your hands don’t have to be out. You don’t get exhausted. You don’t get fatigued.”

It’s these advantages that Apple hopes will lead other developers to flood the App Store with dedicated Vision Pro apps. According to Apple, there are currently around 600 Vision Pro apps available—a number well below the iPhone’s millions. Of course, the product has only been on the market for a day. Still, Apple is no doubt hoping developers embrace its spatial computer as they embraced the iPhone. To entice them, the company has built in some cool features, unique to the Vision Pro, which developers can leverage.

One such feature is called “Environments.” These are digital recreations that are projected around the wearer’s space that can make it look like they’re standing in locations they’re not, including above the cloud line on a mountaintop or in a desert. Apple designed these environments to give a interesting background ambiance to Vision Pro activities, such as when you’re viewing photos or using the app for breathing meditation exercises. Third-party apps can also take advantage of these built-in environments.

Remix is working on building its own highly immersive environments into the app, a feature expected to be deployed to users later this year. For the first time, a designer will be able to see how their design looks in real-world environments without having to travel to them—something that should come in quite handy for, say, a designer in Florida creating ski jackets for use in the Swiss Alps.

“If you’re designing a snowboarding outfit, you’d want to see what it looks like in the snow, not inside a studio, not inside a meeting room, which most of the time is where you’re making those decisions,” Malkosh explains. “I’m able to see what that design looks like within the environment it was designed for, whether it’s the beach or the mountains or in the forest—or even in the meeting room, if you were doing a suit.”

With Remix, designers can iterate on their design in the space before them, saving both the time and money of having to first involve a factory. Which can help shorten the amount of time it now takes for a designer to get a product to market exactly as they intended it.

Designers, especially those starting out on their own, will need to contend with Vision Pro’s price tag. At $3,499, it’s an expensive bit of technology and something people and firms with deeper pockets may be able to more readily absorb. At least until Apple figures out how to bring down the cost in subsequent generations.

Remix is available on the Apple Vision Pro App Store starting today. It’s free to try out and offers monthly and yearly subscriptions starting at $9.99.