Tree Magic on the Vision App Store

During my year in London, my roommate Meichun always wanted a Christmas tree. Though I hesitated at first about getting a tree for our one-year rental, her enthusiasm was contagious. I ended up buying a tree my height from Westfield to surprise her.

After returning to China, I wanted to celebrate Christmas properly and bought a large Christmas tree for my living room, but as living space became increasingly limited, I had no choice but to pack up the tree and send it back to Suzhou.

After Vision Pro's release, many things I dreamed of owning no longer needed to exist in physical form. With the headset’s powerful display capabilities, 3D models can seamlessly coexist with real objects, forming a new world for us to live in.

In the first winter following Vision Pro's release, I wanted to build a Christmas tree app—one that would capture the same feeling I had when buying that tree in London.

Luckily, three developer friends also wanted to experiment with visionOS, so the four of us decided to build the tree together.

Just as I often lounge on the couch with Taylor Swift playing, choosing the nighttime Bora Bora visionOS background and spending 20 minutes watching palm trees sway in the breeze, Vision Pro brings the island vacation experience within reach. Our motivation for creating Tree Magic is to give everyone who wants a Christmas tree but is limited by space or storage concerns their very own tree, along with the joy of choosing colors, toppers and and ornaments.

Tree Magic Team: Weidi Tang, Min Pan, Yuchen Wang, Luna Liu

With all of us working full-time jobs, we had limited time to build the tree, dedicating only one week to serious development. While our lead developer Weidi could work on it all day during her company's Christmas break, the rest of us could only start after 9 PM every day. Though we hoped to finish before midnight, we kept getting stuck on basic challenges—the tree wouldn't follow gestures or its top would get cut off—often working until 2 or 3 AM. This "hobby project" proved far more challenging than expected.