Every effort has been made to ensure the experience of using Vista on iPhone or iPad mirrors that when using Vista on Mac. However, due to the nature of these devices, and specific features and limitations of iOS and iPadOS, certain processes differ slightly on the two devices. Read the sections below to find out about features specific to your device, and also tips on how to improve your experience.

Safari on iOS

A tip for getting the most of your Vista experience, when using Safari on iOS, is to enable the full screen view. This gives Vista the full real estate of your device's screen. Notice the difference in the first two images below.

You can hide the toolbar while using Vista on iOS. When hidden, the component that expands with increased app space, is the Rendering Canvas. This means 2D images and 3D models displayed on the app are larger by default, and the small details are more evident. You can hide the toolbar as follows:

• Tap the Menu icon on the URL bar.
• Tap the three dots on the bottom-right, to open more options.
• Tap Hide Toolbar (See the third image above).
• Later, when you are done, tap the URL address, to restore the initial view.

No Volume Viewer

You may have noticed that on iPhone and iPad, the Volume Viewer profile is missing. This is not an oversight. As covered in the WebGL & WebGPU section earlier, Vista makes use of the Web Graphics Library (WebGL) to render high-performance interactive 2D and 3D graphics directly within your browser.

iOS and iPadOS devices cannot render float linear textures. Float Linear textures are floating-point texture formats that store high-precision color or data values, enabling advanced rendering techniques like high dynamic range (HDR) and precise computational effects in WebGL. The OES_texture_float_linear WebGL extension enables linear filtering for these textures, a critical feature for high-quality 3D graphics rendering in browsers.

iOS and iPadOS devices lack support for the OES_texture_float_linear WebGL extension. Unfortunately, this means that iPhones and iPads cannot properly render volumes on the browser. The Volume Viewer profile has therefore been disabled on these devices, until such a time that their underlying operating systems support this WebGL extension.

Memory (RAM)

Thanks to Apple Intelligence, the base memory (RAM) for iPhones and iPads increased to 8GB. 8GB is the recommended minimum memory when using Vista on mobile devices. Unfortunately, only the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 range match this requirement. This does not mean that Vista will not work on earlier devices. Vista will work on all devices running iOS 15+ or iPadOS 15+.

What this means is that when working with large image datasets, your device may not have the necessary memory available to load these images in the browser. For example, when using an iPhone 12 with 4GB of RAM, large datasets may cause your browser tab to reload, losing any progress you may have made in loading and visualizing images. In addition, when handling intensive calculations, for example when creating a complex 3D Surface in the Geometry Viewer profile, your device may be overwhelmed and your browser may reload.

Unfortunately, this is a limitation that cannot be mitigated. If you notice your browser reloading in the middle of a process, this is very likely to be the reason.