We’re only a day away from preorders going live for the Apple Vision Pro, and to give everyone a reason to buy the $3,500 mixed reality headset, Apple has shared a look at an App Store classic that is coming to visionOS — and it’s a great one.
In a blog post on Apple’s Developer website, the company shared a look at Super Fruit Ninja running on the Vision Pro. It looks like the game, which reached insane heights of popularity on the iPhone when they incorporated its multi-touch display that allowed people to swipe their finger in order to cut fruit, is taking things to the next level with the Vision Pro.
Halfbrick Studios, the developer behind Fruit Ninja and the new Vision Pro version of Super Fruit Ninja, says that the Vision Pro version of the headset is “truly bananas.” Samantha Turner, lead gameplay programmer for the studio, said, “When it first came out, Fruit Ninja kind of gave new life to the touchscreen,” she notes, “and I think we have the potential to do something very special here.”
“We needed to understand how to bring those traditional 2D user interfaces into the 3D space,” she says. “We were full of ideas: What if players could squeeze juice out of an orange? What if they could rip apart a watermelon and cover the table and walls with juice?” She laughs, on a roll. “We were really playing with the environment.”
While the original Fruit Ninja gave gamers a sword to cut the fruit, the new version is going to use something else: your hands. Turner said, “We always knew hands would be the center of the experience. We wanted players to be able to grab things and knock them away. And we can tailor the arc of the fruit to make sure it’s a comfortable fruit-slicing experience — we’re actually using the vertical position of the device itself to make sure that we’re not throwing fruit over your head or too low.”
And you’re a powerful weapon. Slice and dice pineapples and watermelons by jabbing with your hands. Send bombs away by pushing them to a far wall, where they harmlessly explode at a distance. Fire shuriken into floating fruit by brushing your palms in an outward direction — a motion Turner particularly likes. “It’s satisfying to see it up close, but when you see it happen far away, you get the full impact of fruit destruction,” she laughs. All were results of hand gesture explorations.
In addition to using your hands instead of a blade to slice your way through all of the fruit, they still kept some of the original aspects of the game that players loved, including the menu. It just flies around your room now.
“That’s where we came up with the flying menu. We wanted a friendly and welcoming way to bring people into the immersive space,” explains Turner. “Before we landed on the menu, we were doing things like generating 3D text to put on virtual objects. But that didn’t give us the creative freedom we needed to set the theme for our world.”
Preorders for the Apple Vision Pro go live on Friday, January 19th, at 8:00 AM ET. The headset will officially launch on February 2nd. If you want to get hyped even more, you can check out Apple’s “Get Ready” ad below:
