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 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, 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 ). 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.
So what models were chosen, out of a vast array of potential options, to appear inside Apple's VR headset? Well, spiders of course, big [[link]] 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 . 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.
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.