🌐 Filmic's Dramatic Shakeup, Mixed Reality Sports
Joey Daoud
December 05, 2023
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A Happy Krampusnacht 👹
In today’s VP Land we’ve got:
🤓 Everything we know so far about Apple’s Spatial Video
🏀 Mixed reality and sports
🥄 Filmic’s entire team is laid off
Let’s jump into it!
STAGE A
What We Know So Far About Spatial Video
Apple’s Vision Pro is still months away from being released. But we’ve already gotten a teaser of how we can shoot and create videos for spatial viewing.
Spatial Videos on iPhone 15 Pro
The iPhone 15 Pro can now shoot spatial videos. The problem is there isn’t much you can do with them yet (though this person on Reddit got them to play on a Quest 3).
However, a handful of journalists were invited to an Apple press event to record spatial video and then watch it (and other clips) on a Vision Pro.
You can read their reactions here, but a common theme that stood out is how intimate and life-like the experience is.
Apple showed me some other spatial videos. In one, a dad was telling his young kids a story in the back of an RV. It was so lifelike and cozy that it almost creeped me out. Why am I spying on this random family? That’s obviously the big appeal here: spatial videos create intimacy in ways 2-D photos and videos don’t.
Not to go too far off on a tangent, but this shares a huge overlap with reality scanning with NeRFs and Gaussian Splats and was another key benefit highlighted in the video we shared last week from Bilawal Sidhu. What are memories going to be like when we can scan a room and be back inside it 50 years from now?
Now as a medium for telling and shaping stories (aka content) - it was also announced that Final Cut Pro would support editing the new spatial video files.
But what what exactly are these files?
The HEVC Multiview(verse)
In an Apple Developer video, they break down what you need to take advantage of 3D video in visionOS. The delivery of 3D or stereoscopic videos is through an extension of HEVC called multiview HEVC, or MV-HEVC.
Each frame carries multiple views for left and right images. The same video file can still be played as 2D on regular devices - it will just play one view, like the left image.
Now one thing noted in the demos above (and when recording on an iPhone) is that spatial videos capped out at 1080 HD.
The presentation doesn’t offer any info on what specs they’ll support with 3D - it only states that 2D videos have 4K support with a 90Hz refresh rate (or 96Hz for 24 fps videos).
What about mixed reality?
One of the most talked about shots from the Vison Pro announcement video was the floating 3D basketball court with virtual players right in the middle of the living room.
We’re already getting teasers of the technology that’s going to make this happen.
