The first Super Fruit Ninja screenshots tease spatial gaming on Apple Vision Pro, and show the passthrough quality.
The Fruit Ninja series was a classic of the early iOS era, started off as a paid iPhone and iPod Touch app in 2010 and selling millions of units in a matter of months. The series came to SteamVR and PlayStation VR in 2016 as Fruit Ninja VR, and to Oculus Quest at launch in 2019. Last year a sequel, Fruit Ninja VR 2, arrived on Meta Quest, Pico, and SteamVR.
A new title in the series for Apple Vision Pro, Super Fruit Ninja, was first spotted in a screenshot listed on the App Store during the headset’s reveal at WWDC, and last week Apple formally confirmed it as a “spatial game”.
“Spatial” is Apple’s preferred terminology for all things AR, VR, MR, and XR, and it won’t let developers use those terms.
Today Apple revealed three screenshots of Super Fruit Ninja and details of the gameplay via the developers, Halfbrick Studios.
To work around the problem that furniture or walls might be in the way of a single launch area for the fruit, Halfbrick Studios arrived at the solution of “a set of cannons, arranged in a semicircle at the optimal distance for efficient slashing”.
While the Super Ninja VR series had you wield blades with controllers, in Super Fruit Ninja you’ll use your hands to slice directly:
“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.”
Interestingly, two of the screenshots show passthrough as the background (ie. mixed reality) and seem to be the first verifiable real screenshots of Apple Vision Pro’s passthrough quality, instead of just marketing renders.
While screenshots may not be representative of what the passthrough looks like in the headset, as many learned with Meta Quest 3, the quality does seem great. In his hands-on time back in June, my colleague Ian Hamilton said Vision Pro’s passthrough was “so good it questions transparent AR optics”.
The third screenshot appears to show a fully virtual environment. But strangely, it doesn’t seem particularly high quality. The texture resolution looks low on the framed decorations, and there’s visible aliasing on the wall edge. It’s odd to see Apple put this out as its first official marketing of fully immersive gaming on the headset, given its beastly hardware specifications.
Super Fruit Ninja will be available on Apple Vision Pro via Apple Arcade, the company’s $6/month game subscription service. The service offers games on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV – and soon Vision Pro too.
For a list of all the AR/VR games confirmed for Vision Pro so far, click here.
