From Helsingborg to Solna
Apple Väla Centrum is closing soon. Plus: Exploring the faux Forum of Destination Video.
Apple Väla Centrum in Helsingborg, Sweden will permanently close on July 13. “Tack för alla fina stunder” — thanks for all the good times — reads an easel currently posted inside the store.
News of the impending closure was briefly announced back in January, but at the time no specific date was given. Now nearly 11 years old, Apple Väla Centrum is one of only three stores in Sweden. It’ll be replaced by Apple Mall of Scandinavia. Well, replaced is a stretch. Helsingborg is some 550km from Solna.
Väla Centrum is the newest store in Sweden, so it’s a bit odd to see it closing, but I’m looking ahead optimistically for what’s in store at Mall of Scandinavia. It’s not often there’s any news from Sweden.
Destination: Seating
It was a slow, extended holiday weekend here in the U.S., so I finally had time to explore a diversion that’s been on my to-do list since WWDC. This year, Apple published a nine-minute session titled “Create custom environments for your immersive apps in visionOS.”
The session outlines design guidelines for building visionOS experiences using demo material from Destination Video, a sample project available to developers. This year, the demo app includes an immersive viewing environment 3D modeled in Blender.
The technical details of the session aren’t important today, nor do I remember them, because I was immediately distracted by the Forum Seats scattered throughout the scene! In the imaginary world of Destination Video, this environment must be an Apple corporate building, because Forum Seats never escape Apple properties.
I downloaded the sample code and dug in this weekend. Inside the app is a Reality Composer Pro package with “StudioLight” and “StudioDark” environments. Open the scene, and there’s our favorite seat!
The cube is modeled and textured quite well, and includes authentic details like the concave seat top. The dimensions are approximately 19.25” x 19.75” x 21”. This leads me to believe it’s perhaps an asset repurposed from the Apple Retail design teams. But could it be freed from the studio?
With fairly little work, I was able to open the scene in Blender and isolate the Forum Seat model. Unfortunately, the textures for every cube were combined onto one “baked” map — a single image with pre-rendered shadows, often used in game design to ease the load on the GPU.
To finish the model, I needed to build my own shadow-free texture from the best scraps of the original, and then brighten it up. The end result isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close! A nearly official Forum Cube model, freed from the eternally-cinematic world of Destination Video:
I’m not really interested in hosting a copy of an Apple-owned model for you to download, but if you’re handy with Blender, you can grab Destination Video and follow the same steps as I did to make your very own Forum Seat model for AR Quick Look. It might even make a great office knickknack for Apple Vision Pro.
Featured image
Apple 丸の内
Photo via @hqk296711463.