Star Wars Watch Party?

Magic Beans of the Week

Apple releases new Immersive Video “Parkour”

After *checks Apple Watch* only three months, the second episode of Apple’s Immersive Video series Adventure is finally here! Despite the delay, it’s a wonderful showcase of the transportive power of this immersive video format. The life and death stakes will make your palms sweaty, and I’m particularly impressed by the creative use of timelapse and freeze-frame techniques.

Immersive video is over a decade old, but Apple has set a new standard of quality for this medium. The combination of high resolution & high frame rate recording with the superb micro-OLED displays of the Vision Pro elevate VR video to the point where I can see this format becoming more common in the future. It’s not the right choice for every story, and certainly traditional filmmaking will continue to exist, but Apple is slowly proving out the potential for immersive storytelling. Let’s hope the next episode comes out a little faster!

Demeo now available on Apple Vision Pro

With a slick promo video, Resolution Games released their strategy RPG game Demeo on Thursday for Apple Vision Pro – a milestone for games with higher production value on this platform. It notably features cross-buy between other Apple platforms like iPadOS & macOS.

I’ve yet to give it a try, but reviewers seem to be not so enthusiastic about the low resolution and difficult controls compared to Quest. This is an interesting test case for how well games on Quest translate to visionOS. Have you tried it yet?

LeiaPix rebrands to Immersity AI, launches new 2D to 3D video conversion tool

Leia has been a leader in spatial media for years, and it’s exciting to see them continue to expand the horizon for spatial media creators. Their app LeiaPix, a tool that lets you convert 2D media to 3D, is now Immersity AI. Beyond the name change, you can also now convert regular videos into spatial videos for both Quest and Apple Vision Pro.

I tried a free 720p sample conversion of this teaser for “The Wild Robot” and I’m impressed with the results. Powered by the Neural Depth Engine, it appears to create depth maps with much finer detail compared to other solutions.

Immersity is not cheap, though! Doing a full conversion of the 2.5 minute video would cost a little under $13. I don’t have a burning need to pay that much for a test like this, but I am curious to see how the quality compares to HaloDepth.

New Marvel exclusive coming to Apple Vision Pro May 30th

Marvel Studios and ILM Immersive shared they’re bringing their “What If” animated series to life as an interactive experience for Apple Vision Pro called “What If…? – An Immersive Story” on May 30th. Most apps on AVP are shipped by indie devs, so I’m excited to see what a larger studio with a higher production value will be able to do!

The prospect of stepping into the worlds of and interacting with characters from Marvel movies is, in many ways, a tantalizing form of wish fulfillment. I’m curious to see how (and if) they’re able to hide AVP’s poor hand tracking. Inb4 why is this not coming to Quest?

Womp introduces PrimFusion V0, a new AI model for generating 3D assets with clean geometry

There are many promising text-to-3D tools and research papers at this point, but I haven’t seen anything quite like Womp’s PrimFusion V0. Their approach is just plain cool, offering a new way to make 3D objects that’s easy and accessible.

By training their model on primitives like spheres, cylinders, and cubes, they’re able to generate assets with geometry that’s highly editable. Their web-based tool seems like a powerful and unique approach to creating 3D – increasingly important as spatial computing becomes more prevalent!