Apple Vision Pro may have VR Apple TV+ content at launch
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
And editing for that? And doing the special effects? And set dressing for those areas not on screen?
And no actor or director or crew member ever leaked it? Or they didn’t notice despite the incredibly obvious camera pictured in the article?
No way at all.
Also, what’s the point? The entire job of the director and film crew is making sure the audience sees what they need. So now I can watch Ted Lasso and choose to look at scenery the entire time that was purposefully cropped out?
Come on. If you’re going to make up rumors do a better job. That camera may very well be real and the thing they used to film the demo videos they showed people.
But it hasn’t been filming all Apple TV+ shows for years. I’ll eat my hat.
It's quite possible it only started recently and this is now the start of the leaks.
This is precisely the reason why narrative storytelling cannot work in VR (other than a simulated movie theater). The reason is that a TV show or movie presents a point of view by its creator and you, the observer, isn't meant to interact with a story whose plot you cannot influence.
That works because viewers already know Macbeth. If was new to you, it would be frustrating because you would miss key parts of the storyline. This is why in TV and film, even if events happen parallel in time, they are presented linearly otherwise you would miss parts.
This seems like a big claim. Is it possible that someone could come up with a way to make it work? I don’t know anything about this stuff but it seems to me that if the technology advances the storytellers will find a way to take advantage of the technology and create new ways of delivering their message.
A "TV Show or movie" I agree is going to have a hard time of that, but just like theatre is different, and games have limited interaction, storytelling can take many forms ("narrative storytelling" doesn't have to completely avoid interaction or influence to tell a story/plot IMO).
I think good AR/VR could open up a different type, the way "Holodeck" writers in Star Trek were shown as a separate skill I think could hold true. Creating believable/rich characters with AI + related environments, and support adapting (even if it is just minimal) story lines will be challenging but I'm sure some people will create interesting experiences, they just need the tools to do so.
The issue is that when key plot points are happening in parallel (common), then you’d miss most of it because you can only watch one thing at a time. Even something as simple as an explosion you might miss because you’re smelling the roses.
This is why in TV, movie, and even theater, parallel timelines are presented linearly; so that you can follow along with the storyteller’s point of view.
Immersive theatre. (Just saw Here Lies Love, for example.)
I explicitly excluded games because that’s already a genre of storytelling that works. The article was about TV shows and movies.
Typical HN comment, asserting that something cannot exist that already widely exists
I suggest you watch Tales From Soda Island for an excellent example of VR storytelling. Then check out Pearl and Alumette. For 360 video check out The Soloist.
Yes, not all old techniques work in the new medium. That is not a reason to write it off, as people with imagination have already proven by developing a new cinematographic language for it.
A recent series like Silo [1] would be a no-brainer for the Vision Pro, for example.
I actually bought the first book, Wool, because I liked it so much.
This is the series based upon the Godzilla / Monsterverse movies.
So, no-one should be saying that all Apple TV+ content has been filmed in this format. But, yes there will likely be at least one show that has been.
I don't think TV+ content needs to be filmed in 180 degrees, any more than we need to see Springfield in 16:9. But I think Apple wants to give the people dropping $3,500 on their hardware a premium experience, so filming some shows like that will help them feel more immersive.
And from people who've used it it's not a full 3D effect where you can fully move your head and see around the scene. Rather it's more like a stereoscopic 2.5D effect where it adds subtle depth to make everything seem more life-like and present but is fundamentally still a fixed 2D derived scene.
That way there is no change to how the content is made.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/06/vision-pro-3d-videos-ph...
When I’ve seen 3-D videos demoed on a Quest they were kind of interesting but the macro-block video artifacts were quite noticeable. You need to show two very high resolution images at (ideally) a high frame rate.
That leads to massive file sizes.
I’d imagine it’s mostly expensive to the servers more so than a technical limitation. YouTube would go under if they were streaming 60GB vr videos to every person.
I think the way we tell stories themselves would have to change for VR TV to make sense.
Sometimes, absolutely. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24025304_Points_of_...
"An exploratory eyetracker study with a custom-designed show indicated a very strong center-of-screen bias with gaze points following a roughly normal distribution peaked near screen center. Examining the show across time revealed that people were rarely all looking at the same location, and the amount of gaze dispersion within frames was highly variable."