Going in-depth on iPhone Spatial Video

The iOS 17.2 beta has brought the ability to shoot in Spatial Video for the forthcoming Vision Pro, and a handful of press participated in a demo where they could view Spatial Video on the Vision Pro headset. While the stuff recorded by Apple with the cameras in the Vision Pro headset naturally had better stereo separation than the iPhone, most members of the press seemed impressed by the content taken from a device that’s far more likely to be available to capture memories. (I’m more than a little curious to see a demo like that myself, but I’d settle for some good sushi.)

Earlier this summer I gave a quick overview of stereoscopic terms and filmmaking. Part of that post had to do with guessing at what Spatial Video was. In Apple’s marketing materials, they show third-person vantages of people experiencing perfectly separated, holographic experiences of things, but the reality is that it has a lot more in common with the left-eye/right-eye combo of traditional stereoscopic video.…