Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Last week I wrote a piece for Six Colors Subsribers on Spatial Video as recorded by iPhone 15 Pro models in the iOS 17.2 beta.

It bothers me slightly that Apple has been pretty vague about how it would all work to preserve the magic of it, because I’ve seen more than a few people decide to jump on the beta and start recording all their special moments as Spatial Video. People are not fully informed of what it is they’re committing to, because they have no way to visualize it.

The brief summary is that the Spatial Video is 1920x1080 HD video and it’s stereoscopic 3D video in the old-fashioned sense that there’s a left eye, and a right eye, and there isn’t some immersive holodeck-like experience (which we knew would not be the case, but was in the marketing videos). The interaxial distance between the cameras is so small that you only get useful volume out of something 3-8 feet from camera, and even that will be pretty mild. The big bummer is that nothing is happening to match detail between the left and right eye to make up for the drastic differences between the paired cameras.

Continue to record all your precious moments as you otherwise would, and do some extra recordings on the side in Spatial Video, but don’t put all your eggs in this basket.

All the details are available if you subscribe to Six Colors for the full piece, and the very 2D video where I walk through a few example Spatial Video recordings from Jason Snell. You should be a Six Colors subscriber anyway for the member content that I don’t do.