In the past 18 months I’ve spent a lot (and I mean a lot) of time using the Apple Vision Pro in our Innovation Lab, mainly giving demos to clients and in some cases, the Imagination team’s close family. The one element that never fails to astonish CMOs and nine year olds alike are the immersive video capabilities. We all love visual media, whether it’s your favourite film or TV series, an arthouse short-film, or in my case, a hectic live heavy metal performance. It puts you in the action by giving you a 180 degree, 3D view.
What excites me is the ability to access a new layer of storytelling. Immersive videos provide an experience like no other. You can tap into sensations otherwise unachievable by making you feel like you are in the video, rather than just watching it. You are entirely immersed in the environment, whether that is underwater or in outer space. It’s not all about the visuals either, the Vision Pro has a speaker positioned above each ear, enriching the experience, capable of positioning sounds within the 3D space. Disclaimer: horror films are now ten times more terrifying.
This is a game-changer for brands. Imagine you’re in the early stages of promoting an upcoming product release, let’s say a car. It’s all well and good using the tried and tested methods, but if you can place the prospective customer inside the product before it has even reached the market or maybe even production, in the driver’s seat, you can truly capture that sense of reality. You’re not just showing them a product; you’re creating a memory.
We’ve been fortunate enough to chat to Apple extensively about the Vision Pro, and they’ve given us insider knowledge on some of the tech used to produce their immersive content, like the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive. This camera was made for the Vision Pro. It has 2 stereoscopic 8K cameras, one for each eye, capturing footage for our entire field of view, and a little bit more. It is a beast. It’s currently available to preorder and is expected to retail at around $30,000. “That’s a lot of money..” you might say, and I’d be hard pressed to disagree, but when you experience what it can do, it makes sense.
At Imagination we’ve been working on exciting apps that utilise the Apple Vision Pro’s spatial capabilities. It isn’t limited to immersive video, we’ve been creating fully immersive, interactable worlds. One of our prototypes allows you to navigate between different stages of residential property development. I know what you’re thinking, that doesn’t sound that exciting, but the app allows the user to manipulate the environment, change the time of day to see how the light falls, and even enter into one of the properties in all of its glory, before a single brick has even been laid. Providing the user with this autonomy is what really hits the mark. With Apple’s effortless eye and hand tracking, there are no controllers, no screens to tap. It just works.
The Apple Vision Pro gives us a peek into the future of cinema, but we know it’s just the beginning. Let’s be honest: the £3,500 price tag keeps it out of reach for many.
So what’s next? It’s rumoured Apple has a pair of AR glasses on the way. For this to succeed, the cost of entry must come down. It’s unclear what impact this could have on functionality, but it could encourage Apple fans to add a new device to their everyday tech ecosystem. For now all we can do is learn, test and build for the Vision Pro. The evolution of cinema is pretty much here, but not yet in the hands of the masses.
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