Hello, Robot: Sandwich launches “immersive commercial”
If there’s a company that’s not shy about experimenting with video possibilities on the Vision Pro, it’s Sandwich. Adam Lisagor and his crew have built two apps, Television and Theater, and have streamed John Gruber’s live Talk Show event in 3-D for the last two years.
On Thursday, they take another step forward with what could be argued as the world’s first immersive commercial. Sandwich and director Seth Worley made a conventional ad for Robot.com recently, but just before leaving for the shoot, Lisagor took ownership of a new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera and couldn’t resist taking it with him.
What followed was an experiment: After each standard 2-D shot was completed, Lisagor shot another version of the same scene with the immersive camera. The idea seems to have been to just see what it might be like to shoot an immersive commercial—pure experimentation.
Then Lisagor started looking at what he shot, digging through the enormous immersive video files he had shot. “I realized I had something unique, unlike anything we’d ever done or seen before,” he says.
But there were practical issues. The immersive shots weren’t the ad itself. They weren’t augmented by visual effects, and they included aspects of the production itself, including a light reflector and a boom microphone. There was clearly no budget to complete an entirely immersive version of the video, so instead, Lisagor and Dan Sturm figured out how to composite a floating screen playing the “real” ad into the immersive shots that matched it. That floating screen looks like a normal Vision Pro window, but it’s inside an immersive video, something that I’d never seen before—and apparently was an enormous production challenge.
The result is a fascinating blend that’s half ad, half immersive behind-the-scenes video. Lisagor says the video will be showcased in the Theater app and is also available for other formats and devices, including on YouTube in a VR180 format.
I got to spend a day at Apple Park last week as a part of the company’s immersive media day for developers, and more than anything else, what I came away thinking is that it’s still incredibly early in the process of building up Immersive videos. The reason Apple has struggled to release more Immersive video is, it turns out, because this stuff is so technically complex than modern workflows struggle to handle the data, all the software to do it is also in beta, and until the Blackmagic camera arrived, all the shooting had to be done with other cameras bodged together in a way that would let it shoot immersively.
Even now, Blackmagic may be struggling to fulfill unexpected demand for its camera, and the software to process this stuff is still going through heavy development and beta cycles. I told this story in this week’s Upgrade podcast, which is titled My TestFlight Has a TestFlight, because I got to peer into one company’s production process in which beta software was relying on other beta software to produce an immersive experience—it’s betas all the way down. (Lisagor acknowledged to me that my perception matches his experience.)
Most video production professionals love stability. But a few also get excited about exploring the edges of what’s known and being a part of the process to learn how to make new stuff and build the tools and the rules that will be used by future creators. (Apple certainly views itself as a builder of tools that enable creative professionals to achieve more.)
In any event, there’s no denying just how much Lisagor and the rest of Sandwich get excited about being on the cutting edge. Sandwich’s immersive commercial might be more of an experiment than a glimpse at the future of commercials, but it’s a great example of the creative energy that’s been deployed to figure out how this medium is going to work.
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