When Sam Gherman designed Da Vinci Eye for Apple Vision Pro, he didn’t have a clue how the user experience was going to end up. Three days before the Vision Pro launch, he decided to totally redesign the app. “I pretty much scrapped almost everything I had worked on and spent the next 72 hours hacking away at this brand-new idea,” he says. “It was so down-to-the-wire that we didn’t get the update live until about the middle of Vision Pro launch day.” The resulting Da Vinci Eye app is a winner of Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards in the apps and games category.
Gherman had spent the previous eight months thinking about how to translate his popular Da Vinci Eye app for iPhone to a virtual reality headset. His iOS software, which allows you to draw live on paper using a photo on the screen of your iPhone as a guide, was inspired by optical devices like the camera obscura (used by Leonardo Da Vinci himself) and the camera lucida, which helped artists transfer the proportions of live subjects to paper with great precision using a mixture of mirrors and viewfinders. The process helped some artists to achieve a perfect reproduction of their subjects’ features.
Gherman always wanted to bring Da Vinci Eye to a headset. When Apple announced the Vision Pro, he knew it was time. “I’ve tried making the app work on other headsets, but none quite cut it. The Vision Pro, though, is a different story. Its tracking and accuracy are top-notch, which is essential for an app like this,” he says.
Gherman spent months working through the app’s UX. He jumped at every chance to use Apple’s developer labs to hone the experience. “Designing for a device that you don’t have access to, for an operating system no one has used before, and for a whole new way of computing no one has experienced yet was a tremendous challenge,” he says.
Eventually, all that toiling and iteration at the Apple developer labs paid off. It’s one of the best apps available for the new device, one that makes the vision of the Vision Pro shine, albeit in a way that’s too niche to make it one of those fabled killer apps that make a hardware device a must-have in the minds of consumers. Still, the app works for some of them. “Art and bleeding-edge technology have been intertwined for hundreds of years,” Gherman points out. “It’s only been the past couple of decades where there is a perception by non-artists that analog art and technology should not be mixed.” He believes that his app may be the key to resurrecting the camera lucida in this digital age to “make art accessible for everyone and to make professional artists’ lives easier.” And if by “accessible for everyone” he means everyone with $3,500 to burn, he’s definitely right.
This story is part of Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards. Explore the full list of companies creating products, reimagining spaces, and working to design a better world. Read more about the methodology behind the selection process.