An admission: I am not a fan of big spiders. I’m especially not a fan of big spiders right up in my face, which is why I’m glad I’ve never experienced an issue a researcher discovered with the Apple Vision Pro headset—which allowed them to create a website that displayed giant animated arachnids and screeching bats in a wearers field of vision.
Ryan Pickren, master of mischief, discovered that Apple’s WebKit still supported an older 3D model viewing standard that allowed them to render animated objects on an Apple Vision Pro (via Futurism). With a simple bit of code, any website could be configured to instruct visionOS Safari to treat certain links as instructions to render 3D models, displaying them on the Vision Pro’s high-resolution internal screens as if they were in the room.
Pickren also discovered that a similar technique could add spatial audio, in order to make sound effects appear as if they were coming from the animations themselves. Bully.
So what models were chosen, out of a vast array of potential options, to appear inside Apple’s allegedly struggling VR headset? Well, spiders of course, big horrible spiders, seemingly skittering all over your desk. Slightly less horrifying (depending on your particular phobias, I imagine) was a flock of bats, which I’ve just learned can also be referred to as a “cauldron”. The more you know!
To make things worse, simply closing Safari wasn’t enough to get rid of the offending beasties, as they were handled by Quick Look, a separate application. The only way to reliably remove them from view (short of tearing the Vision Pro from your face and screaming into the void) was to manually tap each one. Touch the horrifying virtual spider to remove it. Oh no thank you.
Still, Pickren informed Apple of the exploit back in February, and the company appears to have addressed the issue in its June visionOS 1.2 update. Apple has also awarded the researcher with a bounty for finding the bug, or I suppose in this case, developing a horrifying method to force them into your VR space.
Eesh. The whole endeavour raises some interesting possibilities, however. It’s reminiscent of those old-school jump scare videos that used to plague early versions of video hosting sites (examples of which I shall not link to here). All very well, if highly heart-straining, on a 2D plane.
But rendered right in front of your eyes, seemingly interacting with the environment around you? That seems like a new level of stress I’d previously never considered. Thanks, Ryan.
It could be worse, however. Our hardware overlord, Dave James, informs me that he no longer uses his Meta Quest 2 thanks to the discovery of a very real, very large spider inside it when attaching the headset to his face some time ago.
There you go. That possibility is in my brain now, and thanks to this article, yours too. Enjoy your next VR session!
