For several months, my Slack avatar was a screenshot of my incredibly cursed Vision Pro persona. So I was skeptical when, at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced that visionOS 26 had improved the system’s floating avatars. Side profiles have also been improved — something I noticed in a FaceTime with our old weekend editor Wes Davis, a fellow Vision Pro owner who also downloaded the visionOS 26 beta. In my brief hands-on, I also got the impression that Personas in visionOS 26 are also much better at capturing a variety of expressions. (Alas, Wes’ new Persona still has an unflappably weird mustache.)