XR · Apple Vision Pro / Aug 2025
Mist Theater
A detective’s room for watching suspense series.
Mist Theater is iQIYI’s suspense-series label. For its Apple Vision Pro viewing space, our team built a detective’s room inside an abandoned factory, where viewers watch the series surrounded by clues. The space shipped in iQIYI’s visionOS app.
Scene layout.
The viewer sits inside a factory hall about 25 m wide. The start screen, clue board, and desk sit within a 4 m radius, so every interactive object is in reach of a glance.
An earlier, tighter layout felt flat on the device. Two revisions with the team opened the room into near, middle, and far layers.
Three lighting systems and atmosphere.
Suspense, mystery, and a sense of history set the tone. Case files and books sit on the desk up close, the clue board stands in the middle distance, and police tape, factory machinery, and fog fill the far end of the hall.
Looking at the desk lamp highlights it. Each pinch moves the room from morning to dusk to midnight, then back to morning. At midnight, a shadow passes the window every two minutes.
Morning, dusk, and midnight references are AI-generated concept images used to define each state.
Final scene details.
The desk holds case files, books, a camera, and the lamp that controls the lighting. The clue board doubles as a showcase for the season’s series.
A poster highlights when the viewer looks at it; a pinch swaps the posters for a random set from the library. A card on the board shows the gesture.
From first build to device.
We assembled a first build in Unity from the floor plan and concept art, using procedural fog. On Apple Vision Pro, procedural fog was not supported and Unity’s default materials did not render.
I modeled a ring mesh in Blender around the camera and textured it with fog, then we repainted the texture in Photoshop to smooth its edges. iQIYI’s technical team adjusted the materials and fixed uneven lighting.
Team project at iQIYI, Aug 2025. Shipped in iQIYI’s visionOS app.