Spatial video

Apple hopes that "spatial video" is the Vision Pro's killer feature

- CLIFF JOSEPH

IT'S BEEN A bit of a roller-coaster ride for the Vision Pro over the last year. Months of feverish speculation were followed by near-hysteria when Apple finally revealed its new VR headset at WWDC in June 2023.

There were rave reviews when the Vision Pro went on sale in February this year, followed by a backlash over its high price and reports that sales were falling short of Apple's targets (which slightly overlooks the fact that the Vision Pro still has only recently gone on sale outside of the US).

But Apple has always been playing a long game with the Vision Pro, realizing that it needs to put a lot of technologies into place before the headset can appeal to a more mainstream audience than just the developers and "pro" users that it is currently focusing on.

A key technology here is spatial video, which Apple hopes will become a major selling point for the Vision Pro in the same way that the ability to record high-quality photos and videos has been for the iPhone.

Mind you, Apple has been a little vague when it comes to defining exactly what the term "spatial video" really means. The initial announcement of the Vision Pro at last year's WWDC spoke about "immersive video" and even described the Vision Pro as "Apple's first 3D camera" as it would have a special built-in camera system for recording spatial video and photos. And, even before the launch of the Vision Pro, Apple released iOS 17.2 in December last year, which introduced the ability to record spatial video on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max (but not the basic iPhone 15).

So, even if you don't own a Vision Pro headset, there are still many people who can record spatial video on their iPhones, and Apple hopes that this will help drive demand for the Vision Pro among home users and hobbyists who want to watch their spatial home videos in immersive, widescreen glory.