The iPhone 15’s spatial video made Apple Vision Pro much more compelling

Cutting-edge technology has a way of sneaking up on you. One second it’s in the lab, and the next it’s in the code of every company that can put the word ChatGPT in a press release.

For Apple, that quiet technological revolution is coming in more ways than one. The first is in the form of a $3,500 space computer called the Vision Pro. The second, at least in my estimation, just arrived with the announcement of the iPhone 15.

Let’s talk about space video.

Video, but make it spatial

If you missed, or even ignored, Apple’s space video reveal on the iPhone 15, I couldn’t blame you. The idea is a bit of a head-scratcher without context. But just because those words (space video) don’t mean much to you now, doesn’t mean they won’t soon.

While details are still pretty sparse, Apple says its new spatial video feature will allow anyone with the latest iPhone to capture immersive 3D content using their phone’s wide and ultrawide lenses. iPhone cameras have long been capable of capturing 3D information, which is how features like Portrait mode work. Once the video is captured, this is where Vision Pro comes in.

Once you’ve recorded your content (a touching family moment on the beach in Apple’s demo), you can whip out your Vision Pro headphones and watch the whole thing in (sort of) 3D. Of course, Apple says users can share these engaging videos with other Vision Pro owners to help spread the joy.

Exactly As Its spatial content will be in immersive 3D, some would guess that neither the feature nor Vision Pro have shipped yet, but even without trying it myself, I can see how critical the ability to record immersive content could be.

If virtual reality is the future, it must be fun at the same time AND useful. It also needs to convincingly explain why you should strap your headphones to your face instead of just picking up your phone or opening your laptop. Theoretically, spatial video does all of these things.

Are you going to Need watch your vacation videos in 3D on a multi-thousand dollar headset? No you will not. Are you going to Want do that? You just might. And God knows we need to make our friends’ vacation videos compelling somehow.

While VR and AR are arguably bigger now than they’ve ever been, there are still some limitations that keep them from truly being on the rise. For one thing, hardware headphones are often too invasive and cumbersome to justify spending a lot of time on them.

But there is also a problem of content. We’ve written about the dearth of successful VR games and apps before, and it seems like the problem has been in the doldrums ever since. Anyone with an inbox full of $10 off VR games from Meta like me knows that VR games could use a little shake-up.

But what if we didn’t have to wait for developers, studios and tech companies to invest and make the VR content we’ve been waiting for? What if with the help of things like space videos we could create content ourselves?

Sure, not all VR or AR experiences can or should be user-generated, but as long as we sit around twiddling our thumbs and wait for more successful VR experiences to come along, being able to create a 3D or similar experience yourself VR should help keep us occupied, dare I say even entertained.

The final frontier

There’s still a long way to go before we can declare spatial video a revolution, but the fact that Apple bothered to connect arguably its most important product, the iPhone, with the Vision Pro should tell you all you need to know how he views his expensive product. space calculator.

If there’s a way to do something great, it’s to integrate it into the experience of the only smartphone that seems immune to the drudgery of phone buying.

We’ll have an answer soon as to whether the iPhone 15’s spatial video can actually create the compelling and immersive iOS ecosystem that Apple envisioned for its Vision Pro. The spatial video will arrive later this year while the Vision Pro is expected to arrive in the first months of 2024.

Until then we can only imagine what dynamic pairs like the spatial video and the Vision Pro can do and personally my imagination is already running wild.