Solo mode

No Mac, no problem. Chapter Vision can create, edit, and save complete .chapterscript projects entirely on the headset.

What solo mode is

Solo mode is full authoring with the project living on your Vision Pro instead of on a Mac. There's no reduced feature set behind the name: the add menus (primitives, 3D text, lights, particle emitters), the spatial timeline, the gizmo and animation tools, the particle editor, the environment panel, gates, and snapshot undo/redo all work exactly as they do in a tethered session. The only difference is where edits go: straight into the local document, with no network round-trip at all.

Creating and opening projects

The On this device section of the left rail is solo mode's front door:

New Project… prompts for a name and creates a starter bundle (one segment, one ten-second step) in the app's Documents folder, visible in the Files app under On My Vision Pro. It opens immediately, ready to edit.
Open Project… shows the Files picker for any .chapterscript bundle you can reach: On My Vision Pro, iCloud Drive, or another provider. Bundles you saved from Chapter Studio and dropped into iCloud Drive open directly.
Recents lists your last few solo projects for one-tap reopening. If a bundle has moved or its access has expired, the row asks you to pick it again with Open Project…

Opening a solo project loads the whole experience through the player's own loader. Entities materialize, the timeline populates, and videos preheat, so what you see is precisely what the document says.

Editing and saving

Edit exactly as you would tethered. Undo and redo are snapshot-based and instant, restoring the document locally. Media you import in solo mode stays in the on-device cache and plays immediately (see importing media on-device).

When you save, Chapter Vision writes chapter.json back into the bundle and copies any locally imported media into the bundle's assets/ folder, so the bundle stays self-contained — hand the folder to anyone and everything it needs travels with it.

Watch out. Solo saves are explicit; there's no autosave. Save before closing a project or connecting to a Mac; connecting to a live session replaces the open document with the Mac's, and Chapter Vision warns you if unsaved solo changes would be left behind.

Older documents just work

Opening a bundle saved by an earlier version of Chapter Vision upgrades it on the spot: legacy step-embedded animation is hoisted into modern segment animation tracks, and missing newer fields fall back to sensible defaults. The upgrade happens in memory; the file on disk isn't rewritten until you save.

Solo or tethered: which to choose?

Choose	When
Solo	You're away from your Mac, capturing and composing on location, sketching an idea on the couch, or the project simply lives on the headset.
Tethered	You want the Mac's big-screen timeline and inspectors alongside in-headset editing, two people are working at once, or the project's home is on the Mac.

They're the same document format and the same tools, so you can move between them freely: start a chapter solo on a flight, then finish it tethered at your desk.

Moving a solo project to the Mac

Two good paths:

Save on Mac. If a solo-authored document is open when you tether to Chapter Studio, the Save on Mac button pushes a copy of the document and its media for Chapter Studio to write to disk. From there the Mac copy can become the project's home.
iCloud Drive. Save the solo bundle to iCloud Drive (or copy it there in Files), then open it in Chapter Studio on the Mac with ⌘O. Because a bundle is just a folder of plain files, it survives any transfer route intact, AirDrop included.

Note. Once the Mac owns the project, connect from the headset as usual and keep editing the same chapter over live sync. Solo mode is a starting point, never a silo.