Imaginative Universal, Inc.  ·  Independent apps for Apple Vision Pro and iPhone

Small studio.
Big room.

We make and publish native apps for Apple Vision Pro and iPhone: architectural visualization at true scale, tools that understand the space you’re standing in, experiments in what a computer can be once it leaves the screen, and an iPhone app for keeping your programming fundamentals sharp.

See the work
Atlanta, GA Kinect 2012 HoloLens 2016 Magic Leap 2018 Vision Pro 2023 Scroll

Apps

Apps you can walk through, and one for your pocket.

Video slot 01

Tabletop AR

Pinch a creature out of the menu, drop it onto any surface, and fight it across the books on your coffee table. Tabletop combat in passthrough, on whatever surface is in front of you.

Platform
Apple Vision Pro
Stack
RealityKit · ARKit scene understanding
Status
In development
Video slot 02

Rothko Rooms

A museum walkthrough at human scale. Galleries hung with the color fields, wall placards you can read, and paintings you can stand in front of for as long as you like.

Platform
Apple Vision Pro
Stack
RealityKit · Reality Composer Pro · USD
Status
In development
Video slot 03

Infinite Dots

An experimental space in the spirit of Yayoi Kusama. Dotted pumpkins and tendrils drift in a black void that opens onto an endless field of lights. The subject is perception itself.

Platform
visionOS
Stack
RealityKit · Reality Composer Pro
Status
In development
Video slot 04

Semicolon

An iPhone app for keeping your programming fundamentals sharp, with as little as a lesson a day. Eight courses: ARM64 assembly, Rust, Python, discrete math, Kotlin, SwiftUI, design patterns, data structures & algorithms. Every lesson is a real code exercise. Coding interviews still test this material, and it fades fast when an LLM is writing most of your code. ARM64 assembly and Python are free. If you like them, one purchase unlocks the rest.

Platform
iPhone
Courses
8, 24 sections each
Status
Coming soon to the App Store

The studio

Fourteen years of building past the screen, one platform at a time.

Imaginative Universal, Inc. is the independent software studio of James Ashley, a VR/MR/XR architect who has been building natural interfaces and augmented experiences since the Kinect, and has shipped on every major headset since. Before founding the studio he worked at Razorfish Emerging Experiences, building custom installations for AT&T, Delta, Dr. Scholl’s, Audi and Microsoft, and co-authored Beginning Kinect Programming (Apress, 2012), one of the first published books on Kinect development.

We make our own apps and publish them ourselves. The spatial work is native visionOS, written in Swift with RealityKit and ARKit, with a production 3D pipeline that carries assets from 3ds Max through USD into Reality Composer Pro, and a habit of prototyping directly in the headset.

The name comes from Giambattista Vico’s universali fantastici, the imaginative universals through which people first made sense of the world before they had abstractions to do it for them.Why “Imaginative Universal”

Platforms, in order

  • 2012KinectDepth camera for AR and natural user interfaces; co-authored the first published book on developing for it.
  • 2016HoloLensMixed-reality development from the first developer edition; LinkedIn Learning course, 2017.
  • 2018Magic LeapSpatial applications on Magic Leap One.
  • 2023Apple Vision ProNative visionOS since the earliest developer kits; the studio’s focus today.

Writing

Notes from The Imaginative Universal, since 2005.

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Contact

Support, press, or just curious?

contact@imaginativeuniversal.com