As an involuntarily retired, disabled script kiddie on a fixed income, the price is all-important here. How much will the vOS SDK cost? One webpage in developer.apple.com seems to imply that one must apply to get the VisionOS SDK and related tools. Is that above and beyond the free registration to get XCode and related tools or are all the vOS-specific tools still free for the hobbyist/dabbler/curious if they're registered as an Apple developer?

What do you mean by a hardware development kit for Vision Pro? And where can I send ideas about ways to enhance the platform?

Quite the link you gave to : Apple Vision Pro developer kit To support great ideas for apps and games for visionOS, developer kits will be available to help bring your creations to life on Apple Vision Pro. These kits provide the ability to quickly build, iterate, and test on Apple Vision Pro, so your app or game will be ready to deliver amazing experiences. Stay tuned for how to apply. That implies extra cost/extra hoops.

I've got a list of suggestions for Apple on needed/desired enhancements, and running XCode and the SDK as native vOS apps are an extremely important "eat your own dogfood" use-case. It should also be possible to directly TEST an app's appearance inside the real home space if its running that way, for maximum accuracy, and, for wow factor in future demos. And bunches more: https://www.reddit.com/r/visionosdev/comments/146i00j/suggestions_to_enhance_visionos_in_some_way_this/

Everyone should just pester them until they recompile it. If they can't port their own SDK to the platform that they claim is trivially easy to port MacOS software to, then there is something seriously wrong. If they can, its a good selling point about how even an extremely complex ecosystem (probably command line tools shouldn't be supported, I'll agree) can run without anything but simply changing the target when you compile the project. Its also convenient.

https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg?t=128 seems to show a 3D movie taken outdoors.

I may have misunderstood. The video showed a dialog to request capabilities permissions for eye tracking ala the current security process on MacOS. If you saw that video and heard it to mean something else, then I'm probably misremembering.

I understand the desire to make it a playground, but not allowing livestreaming is a HUGE misstep. I mean, there are people who make their living live streaming video games and one of the earliest books about augmented reality was Reality Park by Nivens and Barnes, which was ALL about livestreaming a LARP AR game watched by millions: https://www.amazon.com/Dream-park-Larry-Niven/dp/0932096093/

Even if no 3rd party app provides this 2D streaming output, Apple should still supply a 2D streaming capability so college professors can use this thing to lecture to classes via a 2D video projector and social media influencers can use it to stream to youtube. Demos of how to program it will be MUCH more compelling, and tutorials far more popular, if they can be performed in the 3D space and exported to 2D for others to watch.

I haven't tried starting teh simulator via drag and drop (f that is what you are doing), but the simulator, if xcode is installed correctly, starts just fine if you click the |> run button in xcode for a properly compiled app... at least for me. Have you tried it starting the simulator from within xcode that way? Does it work as expected?

Ws there a video to go along with the API?

The ACTUAL solution is to ensure that the file you are un-xipping is on the internal SSD. Once I copied it over, the decompression went literally 10x faster.

Is it normal for the termperature on a 16GB mini to max out? Whenever I run the simulator or simply run even the template "Hello World" starter project for vOS, my temp goes up 98-100C

That makes no sense as the demo of Happy Beam shows the game running in the living room itself. or did I misunderstand.