Apple Immersive Video & Spatial Computing
Apple Vision Pro
Apple Immersive Video
and Spatial Computing
August 2026
The momentum around Apple Immersive Video is growing. This month, we hear from a creator who spent a year with immersive projects, we meet ZeusXR's new sharing link that makes immersive video available across multiple platforms, take a balloon ride to the stratosphere, and we learned that Apple is bringing Friday Night Baseball live to Vision Pro in Apple Immersive Video.
Carl Amadeus Hiller's essay is one you'll want to keep handy. His experience goes beyond the technical: a beautiful spatial postcard doesn't create a memory, it's the story, and the people in it, that stay with you. We've also included a link to one of his own immersive projects.
From there: a visit to the Tennessee Aquarium, A.R. Rahman's new immersive app, Jon Favreau using Vision Pro on set to visualize scenes before they were built, and more. It's been a busy month for immersive video, and I don't see things slowing down any time soon.
Keep making memories,
Imagination Ave
The Big Story
"Apple Immersive Video Is a Medium for a Physical Sense of Presence"
With more than 20 years directing film and concert productions, Hiller has shifted his focus over the past year almost entirely to Apple Immersive Video, shooting on a Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive. He recently published "One Year with Apple Immersive Video," a long-form essay he calls less a technical report than a personal account of real productions.
Hiller makes an observation early on: "Even a spectacular landscape or an exceptional building can eventually feel like a very high-quality spatial postcard. A location becomes a story only when I meet a person there, witness something happening, or build a relationship with someone and their activity." His answer is a formula he traces through his own work again and again: person, activity, place, and change. A view alone isn't a story. A person doing something specific, somewhere specific, changed by it, is. Hiller describes the first time Myerscough watched the completed version of "We Make Belonging": she was "almost shocked at first," describing the feeling as meeting her own digital twin.
There's technical content as well: he breaks down exactly why 90fps capture matters for how believable movement feels. He also raises whether Apple Immersive Video could work as a kind of coaching tool, letting someone see their own posture or presence from the outside. Hiller closes with a line worth repeating: "With Apple Immersive Video, I can allow people to physically experience a real place, a person, and a moment, and turn a film they have watched into a memory of their own."
Want to see his work for yourself in Vision Pro? Watch "Faces of Fourni", available now on Amplium.
Read the full essay (English PDF) | Original LinkedIn post
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Just Announced
"Friday Night Baseball" Comes to Apple Immersive
The broadcast features commentary from Paul Severino, Xavier Scruggs, and Michelle Margaux; dedicated replays; and an immersive graphics package with team lineups and stats floating in the viewer's space, all captured with ambisonic microphones for Spatial Audio during live breaks in the action.
One game each Friday will carry the Apple Immersive broadcast through September 18: Red Sox at Yankees on Aug 28, Angels at Pirates on Sept 4, Padres at Giants on Sept 11, and Giants at Dodgers on Sept 18, as Los Angeles looks to clinch a fifth consecutive division title.
Read the full announcement (Apple Newsroom)
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Now in the Theater App
"The River You See" — Slow Down, Look Around, and Experience Hope
Produced by Sandwich Vision and SpatialGen, "The River You See" is a 4-minute Apple Immersive Video visit to Chattanooga's Tennessee Aquarium, where the film's own framing calls the conservation work happening there "equal parts joyful and marvelous." We flagged the 27-second teaser back in July; this is the full release, and it's live now in the Theater app.
The film puts you right inside the aquarium's habitats: ring-tailed lemurs perched on rocks and branches, tortoises gathered underfoot, the kind of close, unhurried encounter that's genuinely hard to get in person even with a ticket in hand. It's a good example of the format doing what it does best: less spectacle, more presence, and a real institution's actual conservation mission sitting right behind the visuals rather than as an afterthought.
Theater app | Watch in Vision Pro | Tennessee Aquarium
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Other Immersive Content
Mission Stratos — To the Edge of Space and Back
Mission Stratos follows a stratospheric balloon launched from Timmins Airbase, Canada, rising far above the clouds as part of the STRATOS program, a joint research effort between the Canadian and French Space Agencies. It was shot by The Dorothy Project on an Insta360 Titan (11K), so it's 360° content rather than Apple Immersive Video's stereoscopic spec, but the production quality is genuinely high-end, and the view speaks for itself.
What keeps this from being just a pretty view is what's actually behind it: real near-space research, built for STEM audiences, not a tourism reel. Mel Randall of Arluma360 described watching the raw footage for the first time as one of those moments that reminds you why this format exists at all: nothing else puts you at that altitude, looking down at the curve of the Earth, quite like this does.
Watch the ‘making of’ | Download Arluma360
Back to topFrom the Field — Productions & Creators
A.R. Rahman Brings Two Decades of Immersive Storytelling to Vision Pro
Two-time Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman ("Slumdog Millionaire," "127 Hours") has launched ARR Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, confirmed via a Variety exclusive. The launch library reworks footage from "Le Musk," his 360° film that debuted at the Cannes XR Festival, for Vision Pro's spatial format, alongside new content made exclusively for the platform: three Kathak dance performances merging Western orchestral scores with Indian classical dance, and "ARR Live," a dedicated section for his concert performances.
Read Variety's exclusive | Download ARR Immersive
Back to topProduction, Workflow & Tools
ZeusXR Player — One Link, Every Headset
ZeusXR, founded by Daniel Vega, has introduced a new distribution technology built around the simple idea of a single shareable link that adapts playback to the device that opens it. That means native MV-HEVC streaming on Apple Vision Pro, and interactive stereoscopic modes on Mac and mobile.
Two demos accompanied the launch — one of them uses footage from Hiller, our lead story above. Vega brings 25 years of experience in stereoscopic media to ZeusXR, and frames the player's anaglyph mode as "connecting the origins of stereoscopic imaging with the future we are now building."
Read the announcement | Watch the Blackmagic demo | Beta registration
Back to topAlso Worth a Look
The world of immersive video is expanding, here are more stories genuinely worth your time.
- ✈️ Flight Sight: Pilot Training — a familiar name to our readers, John Racine of Rogue Labs, had his AIV-powered pilot training app featured on the App Store home page, with a fresh content update. Real Apple Immersive 3D 180° training footage inside. App Store
- 🎓 Canon EOS VR — 4-part tutorial series — Matthew Celia of Light Sail VR helped Canon put together a genuinely useful tutorial series for immersive filmmakers, covering everything from pre-production through stereoscopic post. Watch the series
- 🎪 Catching up on AWE 2026 — if you missed the conference, a few sessions from AWE are worth revisiting, including "How Live Immersive Video Is Accomplished" with SpatialGen and Blackmagic, "Inside the Immersive Video Renaissance" with Targo and Blackmagic, and "Presence Is the New Premium" with Hugh Hou and Keeley Turner. Immersive Video AWE Playlist
- 📹 Live Camera in Spatial Film — Hugh Hou's new on-set 3D 180° monitoring tool solves a real production headache: seeing a proper stereo preview while shooting, instead of two flat fisheye circles. Learn more
- 🔧 AIVU Merger — a new community tool for combining, splitting, and reordering AIVU files without a full re-export, aimed at anyone who's had to fix one small error in an otherwise-finished file. AIVUMerger app | Details on Reddit
Just for Fun
How Jon Favreau Used Vision Pro on the Set of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
Not immersive video, but too fun not to mention: director Jon Favreau and ILM visual effects supervisor John Knoll used Apple Vision Pro to scout virtual sets and preview shots at true IMAX scale, long before anything was physically built. "The stereo viewing experience on Vision Pro is the best I've ever seen," said Knoll. "The images are bright, sharp, and perfectly synced."
The Mandalorian and Grogu is now available to buy or rent on the Apple TV app.
🌌 Also spotted: a fan built a custom "Silo"-inspired Vision Pro environment ahead of the show's Season 3 premiere, a nice small reminder of how much a well-built environment adds to a sense of place, even outside of video content. See it on X
Back to topNews & Use Cases
Accessibility Is Now Part of USD's Core Schema
OpenUSD has formally added UsdUIAccessibilityAPI to its core schema, meaning accessibility metadata like labels, descriptions, and priority can now live directly inside a 3D asset, rather than being bolted on afterward. Blender 5.1 and Maya-USD already ship support, with accessibility data surfaced right in Maya's Attribute Editor.
USD Accessibility API | Maya Attribute Editor | Blender USD Accessibility
A New Agency Is Betting on Immersive Storytelling
Mount Hood, "The Spatial Computing Agency," officially launched in July, founded by Phil Traut and staffed by 18 developers, filmmakers, and 3D designers. Alongside custom native Vision Pro app development, their "Immersive Storytelling" service line specifically promises "high-resolution 180° and 360° video, ultra-realistic depth, and state-of-the-art camera technology," real production capability, not just app development. mounthood.agency
Back to top📱 What's New on the Catalog Site
A few additions to imaginationave.com since our last edition:
Adobe Premiere now runs natively on visionOS, with a spatial editing interface: floating panels, spatial clips directly in the timeline, and a depth slider for compositing text.