Make some space on your desk for fingerpainting some notes with TouchDesk on Apple Vision Pro.
When calibration is set right for your desk, TouchDesk can feel like a bit of magic in the way it embraces Apple’s visionOS operating system. Unlike many Vision Pro apps, the app fully supports Apple’s multitasking capabilities as a shared space app. So unlike FigminXR, which fully overtakes the headset’s system, TouchDesk can sit in the background as a kind of augmentation for your desk, effectively turning it into a touch-sensitive surface and display you might use to jot some notes while doing something else.
You could, for example, quickly write down a combination code you find in the environment while playing a game like Myst in flatscreen.
The app is also a powerful demonstration of hand occlusion for the virtual content you create on the desk’s surface. The effect of covering a sketch with your hand can be fee like peek-a-boo, surprising yourself to reveal the content underneath when you move your hand away again. You can sketch something out on your desk in mixed reality by directly touching the surface like fingerpaint, or do a kind of gesture-directed drawing that works in full VR too.
While I sat on the moon with a movie in the background and my Mac there with me in ultrawide, TouchDesk essentially transported my desk there with me as a surface to draw on that I couldn’t even see.
On Quest headsets, we’ve seen innovative apps like Pencil use Meta’s controllers as paperweights to sync up the location of virtual outlines on physical paper, providing a surface to trace anything and practice the basic steps of drawing. While that app assumes the use of a traditional pencil for sketching, here you use your finger directly on the desk.
TouchDesk developer easybreezy on X responded to UploadVR’s messages to acknowledge many areas for improvement after their “MVP”, or minimum viable product. Future features planned include import and export, tilting boards and adding text or images.
Easbreezy wrote that multitasking “allows me to organize my thoughts while using TouchDesk, operate my ultra-wide Mac screen, and use other apps simultaneously! When I’m not using TouchDesk, I can minimize it to a corner (click the icon in the top left corner of the board to collapse it) and quickly reopen it when needed.”
“I am currently working on providing more assistance when users drag and drop the board while maintaining the shared space. I’m also exploring an immersive space mode where the board can be automatically placed. Users will be able to choose between these two methods.”
Easybreezy tells UploadVR they are based in Suzhou, China, and resigned from ByteDance last October to independently develop apps for Apple Vision Pro. I asked if AI was used in the making of TouchDesk:
“I occasionally consult ChatGPT for programming issues. It’s a great assistant and has helped me solve many mathematical and programming problems that I wasn’t familiar with (my previous role was as a product designer, so I’m not highly skilled in programming). However, I’m not currently using tools like Cursor for AI assistance. I might explore using such tools in the future.
You can find TouchDesk – Desktop Canvas on the Apple App Store.
