The Theater application for the Apple Vision Pro by Sandwich Vision launched in June 2024 with the spatial livestreaming of John Gruber’s live interview of Apple Executives at WWDC. They have been collaborating with independent producers of spatial video to distribute rentals and purchases of immersive content spanning across stereoscopic 180-videos to educational planetarium content to more experimental dome content as well as stereoscopic captures of live music performances (I can highly recommend checking out Fungi: Web of Life by K2 Studios). Users can also connect their private collections of movies via Plex Media Servers to enjoy their own private movie collection in a virtual home theater experience with a number of different theater options. They’re also currently implementing social features, and may start having live screenings of classic movies with potential collaborations with independent movie theaters.
I had a chance to catch up with Sandwich Vision co-founder Adam Lisagor to hear a bit more about his journey into the XR space, how he’s blended storytelling and technology throughout his career, as well as his hopes for what might be a new renaissance of spatial video content given Apple’s emphasis of on 180-degree spatial video rather than the VR filmmaking era of 360-degree videos.
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Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be doing a deep dive into a theater application on the Apple Vision Pro called Theater by Sandwich Vision. So this is an application where you can essentially go into a movie theater and watch some stereoscopic movies, some 3D movies. They've got a whole planetarium, so you can see large-scale format content, dome content. So they've been working with some producers of original content that are specifically for these new media, things that you normally wouldn't be able to see in any other theater. And they've also been featuring some live music and going to be adding some social components here soon. So... I want to sit down with Adam just because there's a number of different pieces that I have seen on the film festival circuit, like Lipotopia, I've talked about interviewed here on the podcast. And there's going to be a piece that's going to be shown at South by Southwest called Currents that is going to be made available on this application. So they're featuring a number of different independent immersive story content that I tend to see on the festival circuit. And so it's just kind of an interesting development to see new distribution channels for this type of content, specifically for a lot of the 180 spatial video type of formats that Apple has been pushing forward. And with new cameras that are coming out, then there's a lot more excitement and buzz that is around this type of content. with new creators coming into the space and having a little bit different take on what Adam Lissagor says in this interview is more of that first phase of immersive cinematic storytelling that's more in the VR filmmaking that he calls it, which is more around 360 video. And now with Apple, they've taken a very distinct decision to only really promote this kind of 180 format. So it's got these new constraints, but also new opportunities to really push forward the grammar of special storytelling. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Wasteless VR Podcast. So this interview with Adam happened on Wednesday, March 5th, 2025. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:21.440] Adam Lisagor: All right. So my name is Adam Lissagor. Many, many years ago, I came from visual effects in movies and commercials, and I had gone to film school. I was always a tech person, tech minded person and future looking person. And then when the iPhone came out, I got real excited about that. I was always an Apple guy and I wanted to make software for it. It just seemed like a very cool, creative new medium. So I worked on an app for a while with a buddy and it was a creative writing app for Twitter, like a client where you could only write and post and sort of like refine your ideas and drafts. And it was called Birdhouse. I made a little commercial for it to launch it. The commercial got a lot of attention. The app got so-so attention. And before I knew it, I was getting contacted by some of the cool startups like Square and Flipboard and back then Jawbone and really neat companies. In the early days of that era of tech, where the web was becoming alive, there was this whole new platform for personal computing. And they all needed stories to be told. And it just so happened I had an aptitude for doing that because I sat in the intersection of filmmaking and tech and storytelling. So I instead of doing software, I did that for 15 years. And then 15 years later, everything came full circle. There was a kind of a new software platform coming online that was very interesting being AI. And there was a new personal computing platform coming online with being spatial computing. And I say coming online not to disregard the previous, you know, decade or two of interesting work being done in XR. But when Apple enters a market, it sort of validates it in a different way. So I decided, hey, maybe I really do want to make software again. And I was able to amass the resources of running my own creative studio for all those years to start to self-fund building some of these tools. So now I have a app studio called Sandwich Vision. My previous creative studio was Sandwich Video, which still goes on. It's a team of 12. We still do work. I'm just less involved now. Sandwich Vision set out to solve for the future of entertainment and media in the spatial computing platform. So we launched with an app called Television, which was a very cute little novelty app, which allowed you to put like a TV, like an old fashioned TV or, you know, a modern TV anywhere you wanted in your space and watch stuff on it. And then the natural extension of that was instead of people being outside of that box, people being inside of the box and creating theater spaces for watching media and consuming content. And that has evolved over the six, seven, eight months that it's been in business and on the app store to include other immersive type of experiences like music and performance and all sorts of things, conversation. So that's where we are now. The main thing is theater and that's the company that I'm building.
[00:05:35.063] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I joined Twitter back in 2007. And so I remember those birdhouse advertisements. And then you became the face of all the hot tech startups by reading these ads that were always really creative and innovative and telling the story of what they were doing, but also had this kind of dry humor element to it. So it's cool to see that, you know, now you're looking at the next emerging platforms and Just to take a step back, what was your first exposure to what was happening with virtual reality? Did you have a quest? Was the Apple Vision Pro really your entry point into this space? Or where did you first begin?
[00:06:11.480] Adam Lisagor: It wasn't. The Vision Pro was my re-entry point, but I've always been a proponent. One of the converted in XR. So my first hardware was the DK1, the Oculus DK1. I knew nothing about PCs, but I had to like sort of... go on the internet and build you know hack together my own gaming pc from spare parts you know i made a ton of mistakes and i definitely like accidentally crashed a couple of hard you know system drives and and had to learn the hard way and then navigate the sea of early pre-app marketplace, where do you find content for this thing? All I want is to have endless experiences with it. But there was no real user friendly marketplace. So basically trying everything, just like in old shareware days for the Apple ecosystem. So I was definitely on, I had a DK1. I had the Oculus Quest 1 for sandwich video. We had an HTC Vive for doing virtual production during the pandemic when that was kind of one of the only avenues of making videos when you couldn't go out into the world. So I've explored a lot of it as a dilettante, but never as a developer until now.
[00:07:28.683] Kent Bye: Okay. Well, I know there's been a number of different say theater based apps within the context of the meta ecosystem. The one that comes to mind is like big screen, which I think is.
[00:07:39.208] Adam Lisagor: Yeah, it's great.
[00:07:40.509] Kent Bye: You know, it's around like sharing your screen and big screen though. There's some social components. So right now, as far as I can tell theater cinema events app for the Apple vision pro seems to be single player. Is that correct? And I have plans for making it more of a social experience.
[00:07:54.827] Adam Lisagor: It is, but we hired an engineer to work on SharePlay. And today at two, all five of us on the team are getting on a SharePlay call to demo the new social shared version of theater, which we're really excited to launch to the App Store pretty soon. We just want to make sure it's a... A great experience because early tests, and this was going back probably four or five months, early tests with SharePlay, it wasn't as easy to implement as it was with something like our television app. There's already conventions for being in your pass-through space. and then somebody's Apple Vision Pro persona is sitting next to you, we all kind of know what that experience should be like. And there's plenty of other apps that implement this idea. But it's a totally different idea to be in a constructed space. And relative to that space, be next to each other and all kinds of things can break and go wrong. For instance, one of the funnier ones was when there were three of us in a theater watching something and we were all like effectively crouched under the seats. Like we, we, we like couldn't break out. We couldn't get out from under these theater seats where normally there'd be like sticky gum and popcorn and stuff. But like, it's just a weird claustrophobic, uh, user hostile, you know, situation. If suddenly you're cramming somebody into somewhere uncomfortable that they don't want to be. So we need to make sure to solve for all those edge cases first or those fail States first. And that's what we're doing now, but it's definitely social. And to your point, big screen was, is awesome. Um, I got exposed to an early, early beta when they were even pre-launch back in the day. And like, I just kind of knew it as this way that you could like chill in a very like upscale apartment type vibe and go out on the balcony and sort of be in a different space. And that was really the unlock for me was, you know, aside from the like the chalet and the like the geodesic domes on the top of a mountain and all that cool stuff. I found that most of what I wanted to do in the meta quest was I wanted to be in different spaces. It just feels so good. It's so transformative. So that's what I knew I was building towards. I want everybody to have that experience. And what's a natural thing to do when you're in a different constructed environment? Same thing we do in the real world, which is just watch stuff all the time.
[00:10:26.226] Kent Bye: Yeah, and with the screen resolution of Apple Vision Pro, I feel like something like a theater app really shines in terms of being able to replicate a lot of the core components of not only watching like a normal movie, but having stereoscopic 3D movies that you have featured, but also having like a planetarium and more of a front-facing dome rather than a concentric dome where you're looking up at the content.
[00:10:49.471] Adam Lisagor: We do have that though. We have a 360 more of a planetarium style dome where you're looking up at the content and now we have the ability to like tilt back so the user can be comfortable and not straining their neck.
[00:11:03.081] Kent Bye: And so when you started to build this out, like where did you begin? Cause right now you're about six months or a year in, or you're well into actually launching a number of different things. So where did you start with this as an application?
[00:11:15.714] Adam Lisagor: Yeah. Television, we started working on before the hardware was in anybody's hands. So my lead engineer, Andy, and I went up to Cupertino to a developer lab, which before the hardware was out, they let developers schedule time. You could go into Apple, into the developer center, try your app for the first time on the actual device. I mean, honestly, one of the best experiences of technology in my life was just putting it on for the first time. And seeing the future unfold in front of me. And then of course, seeing our software creation actually working. That was a magical experience. And then they're there to answer questions and everything because it's so nascent. So that was a year ago. Late February was, I think, when it came out. When the device came out and our app launched a couple weeks later. And then in June, my friend John Gruber does a live version of his talk show podcast every year interviewing Apple execs. It's almost always Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak on stage. And then a third high level executive, whoever is in charge of whatever has been announced that year. So this year it was John Dian, uh, Gianandrea JG. I always get his name wrong. Who was the head of Apple intelligence on stage and sandwich video always captures that event live in the theater in San Jose in front of an audience. We shoot it multiple cameras and then we cut it together as quickly as we can. We put it up on YouTube and, Well, this year, knowing that we had Vision Pro in our hands, knowing that I was working on this theater app that we were going to launch soon, I kind of decided this would be a really interesting way to launch the app. Put on the app store for free, capture the event spatially by putting stereoscopic camera on stage to capture it in real time, microphone for the audience. try to get the whole experience immersively in that theater, place that visual inside one of our existing theater environments, and then live stream it out to the app so that anybody could watch it for free. And yeah, Gruber agreed to this. Apple didn't seem to have a problem with it. They were kind of excited and nervous and very skeptical, but they put a couple of, I had access to a couple of people inside the spatial video team that were on hand there to help, you know, to be helpful, to get it calibrated, make sure everything was a little bit dialed in so that we wouldn't embarrass them essentially. And then we live streamed that event and it was just got a good amount of press from the tech trades. And, you know, it went well. There were a couple of hiccups. There was a bandwidth issue. There's like some skipped frames in there. But overall, it proved the concept. It was a very exciting and interesting way to launch an app like sort of live without a net.
[00:14:13.007] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. And you have the recording of that for folks if they want to go watch that conversation. And so it seems like that you've got a number of different, let's say, genres or formats where you're looking at more stereoscopic videos where you can have like three different theaters, like a home theater and different... iterations of different types of like a small theater, like a theater that's a little bit bigger and darker. And then you have one that actually has like exit signs, which is one of the things that are like, I was like, okay, that is skeuomorphic in a way that is designing what it would actually be. But I kind of want this to be like a perfect virtual realm where I don't have any distractions of things that I'm looking at.
[00:14:48.993] Adam Lisagor: I understand that impulse. Yeah. That theater that you just mentioned is modeled exactly after the Vidiot's Eagle Theater that's in my neighborhood in Eagle Rock. It's a beloved, beloved cinema organization that shows old movies. It's repertory theater, you know, art house films, and it's such a good organization. And I've been a supporter of theirs and just that we consider them a partner because really what we want to have happen is, is that people in our neighborhood can go buy movie tickets and watch a movie in the theater. And at the same time, people that are not in Los Angeles can buy virtual tickets to that same movie screening and watch it in our app in real time and be sort of co-present and celebrate the culture of cinema in that way.
[00:15:40.336] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know I had a conversation with Darshan Shankar of Big Screen where he was complaining because Meta was not making it easy for him to basically have that type of licensing deals for movies. Right. really going for those big cinematic movie productions. And after he would pay the licensing fee on top of the 30% cut that meta was taking, then he was actually losing money on every film that he was selling a ticket for. And so it really wasn't like a viable solution for him to do that. He ended up pivoting and going into the hardware path and he, you know, obviously he's still creating the application, but that was one of the paths towards monetization that he was going to do that type of business model. So yeah, Apple is still taking that 30% cut. So how would you be able to make that work? If it's, you know, old movies, there may be different licensing fees rather than new movies. But is that what you're thinking is that you would go for more of these movies that wouldn't be as expensive to get the licensing fees?
[00:16:38.297] Adam Lisagor: Yeah, that's correct. And really, that's just one revenue stream for us. And it's an easier one to wrap your head around, because we all know what it's like to go to a movie and watch a movie on a big screen. And that's kind of a bridge between the old and the new. But really, the future of this platform is content that you couldn't experience on those old movie screens. And the studios won't have as much say in your licensing arrangements for those things. Also, it's not easy to pull legacy institutions into the future. They won't go willingly. They'll only do it once the concept has been proven. So sort of Netflix is the shining example of legacy media into the future, but they only did it because they offered CDs in the mail, right? They only had that leverage to do it because they'd already built a business with a massive customer base. And they said, hey, movie studios, we have this idea for bringing people your IP directly into their homes. You know, there's no CDs, there's no physical objects, so you don't have any inventory problems. You know, essentially you can scale it infinitely. And guess what? We're also going to make our own content. So are you in or are you out? And the studios regrettably made the right business decision and then proceeded to sort of tank the whole industry. But so, you know, are we is our whole end game to bring legacy IP and tentpole blockbuster movies to a vision pro app? Absolutely not. We're innovators and creatives and filmmakers, and we want to start to build the infrastructure for what is the media of the future.
[00:18:24.523] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, I had a chance to watch the fungi, the web of life featuring the work of Merlin Sheldrake is the son of Rupert Sheldrake. And that was just a really amazing, stunning piece that I think really speaks to the power of doing stereoscopic macro shots of really close ups, just really exquisitely produced piece that seems to be one of the more popular pieces that are on your app. So wondering if you can maybe say a few words about that piece of fungi web of life.
[00:18:56.149] Adam Lisagor: I mean, it's just, it exposes us to a moment of natural magic that we're not usually able to see. We certainly can't watch it on our TVs. You know, it really is by every definition of the word immersive. It's immersive on a natural level that is even more fundamental. So I think that that's why it's a stunning piece of art and one that is not easy to watch anywhere. You know, it's not that platform portable. And so that's why we made these partnerships with people who produce beautiful content like that, because they make this beautiful stuff and they want people to see it. And there's not a lot of opportunity for that because it's very expensive and resource intensive to build infrastructure for the physical display and exhibition of that material. So we can offer them the opportunity to expose their work to an audience through this new platform. They get very excited. Those are some of the easiest deals, more straightforward deals to make with partners, with content partners, because they're just so excited for their work to be presented in a well-packaged container. And yeah, there's a little bit of a revenue stream for them, but that's not why any of them are doing it. I don't think that's certainly not why we're doing it.
[00:20:17.465] Kent Bye: And how did you come across that as a piece? Is that something that they had produced on their own and they were looking for places to exhibit it? Had that been premiered anywhere? Were they showing it anywhere else? Or just give me a bit more context for that piece in particular.
[00:20:30.848] Adam Lisagor: Sure. There are a number of top shelf producers and creators of this content. And they're at studios like K2 and Reef. And there are a number of others, Hublot. And they are essentially studios that make this stuff. So we are an exhibitor. So we can form a partnership with them. My partner in theater, Jose Marquez, is really gifted. He's a former media executive, comes from NBC Universal. And his job was always to figure out how to bring new media to traditional platforms in a corporate context, which is a really hard thing to do. So he's got this natural way of communicating the value of this to people who make beautiful things. So he's out there, you know, every day having phone calls with people who make this new, beautiful content and saying, we'd love to partner with you. We're not aggressive in our, in our revenue split. We basically like, this is all building towards the future. So it's not about money. It's about access. Yeah. And everybody understands that narrative, I think.
[00:21:50.005] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, being in the XR industry now for coming on 11 years in May of this year, but if we go back to 2012, that's when Nani de la Peña and Hunger in LA first showed at Sundance. And I first went to Sundance in 2016. And what I've noticed, it's really kind of interesting to see the evolution of immersive storytelling through the lens of these festivals, because at the beginning, there was a lot of 360 video content. and also a lot of CGI as time went on, there was more and more. But Meta had Oculus TV where they were showing a number of this type of content, but they were never charging anything from it. It was one of those things where they were just giving it away for free as a way of building up the brand and people were watching it. But in terms of the content producers, it was almost like all or nothing. Like if you get funding from Meta, you're good. But if not, then it's a real struggle because there really wasn't a marketplace for people to buy this type of content. Then we had things like The Sphere and Cosm. These are places that are trying to take the affordances of what we've seen with domes and planetariums and trying to create more artistic content using that with storytelling and other ways, you know, live sporting events specifically with Cosm is really taking off. But there have been like full dome experiences that have also been created, I guess, in this network of folks that have been producing this content and exhibiting it to themselves, but yet... the distribution at a mass scale would really be constrained whether or not there would be a dome in a city that was actually exhibiting this type of content. And so you're kind of tapping into a long legacy of people who have been producing this type of content, whether it's 360 video, 180 video, stereoscopic content, but also dome and planetarian content. And this seems like a really perfect exhibition platform for a lot of that content that's out there. So I'd love to hear your take on the existence of that ecosystem that was already there and how you're able to potentially fulfill a new need of distribution of that type of content.
[00:23:49.024] Adam Lisagor: Yeah, thank you for the question. It's really interesting territory. A couple weeks ago, Jose and I went to Cosm just to check it out, see the experience in person, because neither one of us has been to the sphere yet. And clearly it's set up for sports and that's the premium content they're offering, which is the killer content use case, of course. But they needed this content to fill the space, right, to just support the business and get people in those seats, you know, ordering appetizers in between sports games. Yeah. We paid money for those tickets. I forget, something like maybe 40 bucks each for the experience of going to that spectacular immersive environment. You know, the food was pretty good. I think we had some salmon tacos and a couple of cocktails. And, you know, it's not centered around the content itself. Like it was a back-to-back showing of a couple of largely CG generated immersive pieces of content, each one a half hour long. But really, is that why you're there? Kind of. I think it's just the extrasensory experience that you're going for. It's something that's out of the norm. But I wouldn't go unless I was a sports fan. I wouldn't really go back. But if I had access to it that was a little bit more affordable and from my home, then, yeah, definitely I would go. And I think that my point being that as this market opportunity starts to scale. as it sort of breaks out of its constraint of its shack right now that it's in, which I would consider however many users there are in a Vision Pro right now, it's a very small number relative to what it'll be in three years. When that starts to scale, then I think the numbers start to make a little bit more sense. And the content will be more interesting. I think there will be a lot more filmmakers that are enticed to make it to creating these types of stories because for one, they'll see what's out there and they'll say, I can dream up something that's different from this. I mean, certainly that's for a lot of filmmakers working in immersive right now. That's what something like the submerged film that Apple put out was. That was like, oh, this was an interesting execution of this format. I have an idea that might be better than this. Uh, so I think that that's the point of this early content. That's like the point of people being those early audiences and seeing a train, the Lumiere brothers train coming at them was like, wow, that was interesting and new and compelling. What if it's not a train? What if it's something else? And that's really, that's the fuse that lights the fire of a whole storytelling industry.
[00:26:46.326] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's this interesting story I have from Sundance 2016, the first time that I went, where I watched a piece called Collisions VR in VR, and then they had a group showing in the Egyptian theater with a bunch of people who were also watching it all at the same time. And when I watched it, it was basically the same experience for when I watched it alone versus when I watched it with a group of people. So when I went to Cosm, I went to see a Cirque du Soleil experience, which I think would have been different if I would have seen like a sports event, because, you know, the whole thing that they have for Cosm is what they call shared reality, which is that you're seeing it with a group of people. There are other years at Sundance where Samsung, when they were still doing the Gear VR, they were doing some exhibitions where they were showing some comedies within VR where everybody was watching them at the same time. And I think that type of thing where you can hear other people laughing while you're also watching it, it gave that type of social presence or that type of group shared experience. And I think sports is one of those things that really lean into that shared experience, but they do have a lot of artistic content. And I hope that in terms of the scale between the sphere and Cosm, Cosm has a lot more leeway to experiment with that type of artistic content where the sphere has a little bit less ability to be experimental. So I love the fact that there can be experiments with trying out different types of immersive art that could be seen on that big majestic screen and have that with a family experience. But I feel like what you've created with your app on the Apple Vision Pro, it starts to have at least the same, maybe it's not the exact pixel density, but it's the same equivalent type of experience where when I was watching some of the pieces, I was like, okay, well, I can see how there'd be some difference from seeing this at say a place like Cosm or some pieces that I think would better to be seen alone, especially if there isn't that shared group experience of like reactions that are coming from the audience. Curious to hear some of your thoughts and reflections on that sweet spot of those shared experiences versus what you think the affordances of the Apple Vision Pro and what you can do with your app.
[00:28:46.108] Adam Lisagor: Yeah, interesting. So I've always loved movies since I was a little kid, of course, like so many of us. And then as soon as I learned at the age of like 10 or 11, as soon as I learned that there were people whose job it was to make those movies, I wanted to be involved. And anecdotally, when I went to film school was when I started to like movies less because you sort of see behind the curtain and it's a lot more complex and a lot more friction to the joy of experiencing them than you would think. Now I'm in my forties and I'm just kind of grumpier about everything. So I don't necessarily require movie going as a social experience anymore. You know, the short version of this is I don't love being in a movie theater with other people. I find it more annoying than additive to my experience. I love being with my family. It's my favorite thing to do is like watch movies with my family. It's great. But I don't want to watch movies with strangers. It's not great. They're inconsiderate and they chew their food loudly and they talk during the movie and all this stuff. They ask questions loudly. So I like the idea of having control over that communal experience. If I could dial it down or up when I wanted to. And I think that's what technology kind of offers us. We do have this demo of kind of what I mentioned before with the co-presence of a real audience and a virtual one. where you get a sense of the audience around you and sound, but it's not so much that it's encroaching on your space. It's almost like reflections, acoustic reflections in the theater space itself, rather than dominating voices of other audience members. And that ends up being a really good experience. I think that it's a level of taste that you can set for somebody's immersive social communal viewing of a piece of media. So I like it for that opportunity. I don't want to see other people in the audience necessarily. I don't think I need like virtual audience members in order to understand that it's a communal experience. But I love my friends and I love my family. So if they can be in here with me, that's great. So yeah, I think short version, it's all about control. Does that answer your question? Yeah.
[00:31:14.288] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I think for me also, there's an element of it. It's sometimes if you're not actually engaging with other people during the screening, like I saw Oppenheimer in the big screen, 70 millimeter print here at the Hollywood Theater in Portland, Oregon. And that was a great cinematic experience. I think sometimes there are types of films that I would really prefer to see on a big screen, even if there are some inconveniences of the audience. I'm just reminded of Sean Baker's speech at the Oscars saying, you know, we're we need to still go have the theater experience. And I think that's an important part of our culture.
[00:31:43.677] Adam Lisagor: We took note of that. Yeah, I shared that in our team Slack for sure.
[00:31:47.418] Kent Bye: So I think there's still that element that is an important part of the distribution of culture in a society that's important to maintain those institutions. But being an advocate for immersive technologies, I do see that there's these new forms of entertainment and content And so just to follow on just quickly on the sound issue, because I think a lot of theaters, when you have these exhibitions, there's things like Dolby Atmos to implement sophisticated sound spheres. And there's when people have their home theaters, they have 5.1, 5.12, including a subwoofer, including back speakers. And so I didn't try in the experience to go hook it up to my sound bar with my subwoofer, but I could imagine that this would be a good to connect to Bluetooth to your existing sound system and then just get all that dialed in because I do think the Apple vision pro as good as the audio is, it's not as good as say, like being embedded within the sound field of a whole array of different speakers. But in terms of implementing on your end, the sound of the cinematic experience, it's What kind of formats do you support that you're able to then render within the context of what's available from the Apple Vision Pro?
[00:32:54.665] Adam Lisagor: Sure. I mean, we can definitely support multi-channel 5.1, 7.1. We've experimented with Dolby Atmos. We recorded an immersive album with a Grammy-winning artist in a studio, and we went down the road of mixing it for Atmos. But it's like, for weird reasons, Apple makes it a lot more technically complex than you would want it to be to sort of master something in Atmos. I'm not a specs guy. I'm not like a speeds and feeds guy, and I never have been. I want it to be good enough. I want it to be low friction. I don't want it to be relegated to the expertise of highly technical people to create these experiences. There's a well-known clip of Steve Jobs talking about, give him a pair of headphones, and he's in bliss. I'm not going to be that guy, but I will remind you that Pet Sounds was recorded with one mic, right? So you don't always need the most sophisticated technical stuff to make a great experience. It's about the content and the soul of it. And there are some people who are going to like see past the friction and see past the artifacts and find in it the experience that they're craving, regardless of how many channels it has in the mix. And there are some people who are going to really rely on those markers of technical sophistication to tell them whether something is good or not. There's room on this planet for both. And I'm so glad that that other end of the spectrum that I'm not on exists because they're pushing the forums forward. But yeah, like I'm good with a pair of AirPods for listening to most things in my life. I'm just like right in that middle zone of consumerist taste where that's my happy place. And luckily it's better on my pocketbook too.
[00:34:54.807] Kent Bye: Yeah. One other follow-on question was that you do have integration to a Plex media server. I was just looking to see different ways that I can show content and you have stuff that you're selling. You have stuff from your own media library. You have iCloud. You also have like YouTube. So maybe you could describe like what's the use case for people using the Plex media server?
[00:35:15.720] Adam Lisagor: Oh, you know, so there's probably like a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of Vision Pro users and Plex Media Server havers. You know, just people who are going to put in the time and effort to collecting the artifacts that bring them joy and know on a technical level how to do that. Like one of our most requested features before we built it is... And like really one of the best opportunities for doing something of value within this piece of software, which is free, you know, like you don't have to pay for your own content. So I'm really excited about that. Like it's to me like the opportunity to sit in my own like comfortable private home theater environment and then watch my favorite old movies. That's like the dream. If you're a cinephile, that's kind of the dream. So it just maps on a spiritual level.
[00:36:07.256] Kent Bye: And I noticed in the settings you have a tilt so you can tilt it up to 90 degrees so you could lay down and watch movies as well.
[00:36:12.922] Adam Lisagor: You certainly could, although I wouldn't recommend it because spatially it screws with your sense of equilibrium. So you might get up to like go to the bathroom and then just like fall on your face. You know, it comes with a warning, but people requested that feature for sure.
[00:36:29.434] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, and looking at the content that you have so far on your theater app, what I notice is that there's a number of different genres that are there in terms of like there's nature documentary things, there's space documentaries because there's a planetarium connection. So you have a lot of content that would typically be shown at a planetarium where some of it's like more cinematic, some it's more educational. Then you have the more artistic visual art styles that are exploring poetic experimentation.
[00:36:58.656] Adam Lisagor: Trippy stuff. Yeah.
[00:37:00.158] Kent Bye: Trippy experimental music based content where you're just watching the visuals for 30 to 40 minutes. There's some narrative stuff that I thought was interesting, more unreal engine based motion captured science fiction explorations of narratives and stories that And then a lot of content that you have from public domain that you're showing from archive.org and YouTube, these videos that the copyright might have been expired. You can just watch them in the theater. So as you think around, like even just the categories that you have already, and then you see, you know, obviously you have the music stuff, which is kind of like a separate category. live performance, watching someone play music, Lilla Downs, you have a stereoscopic capture of one of her performances. And so I'd love to hear you elaborate on some of the emerging genres of content that you think work particularly well on this stereoscopic 3D or dome content with planetariums in there as well.
[00:37:54.309] Adam Lisagor: Sure. Well, I think the answer to that is we don't quite know yet because we're just on the horizon of having the tools for the capture that are more accessible to more of us. So we all know that this Blackmagic Cine Immersive camera is coming very soon. We put in a deposit for that camera. And I think that it's going to be a very fast takeoff. Once we have the camera in our hands, we're going to be shooting stuff for it and experimenting right away. Because the only evidence we have for what the Apple immersive video format opportunities are is what Apple's already put out on their own channel, which is very interesting stuff. I mean, I would love to hear your take on this. I'm so glad that you're out there doing this work that you're doing and have been for so long. I mean, I mentioned to you, I specifically remember listening to your podcast in the first wave of consumer VR and just being hungry for every single word because it was such a nascent field. I think the real opportunities are in the tools for capture that all of us are going to soon have access to. I think it's an incredible first step and like an introductory step that Apple has made spatial video capture available on the tool that so many of us already have, starting with the iPhone 15 Pro. That sort of capture is very exciting to me because it can get us into this cadence of shoot something in stereo, watch it back right away. The clip goes up to iCloud and now you're suddenly watching it in your Vision Pro. I've only shot one thing in stereo through the entire history of sound video. And that was within the first three years, I think, of business. And it was with a beam splitter and red cameras. And it was one of the most complex processes I've ever had. The post workflow was a nightmare. Like I swear I would never do it again. But now we have those tools for capture available in our pocket and it's a whole new world. It's very exciting. We bought one of these little cameras, this calf viscance, you know, some who knows who makes it, some manufacturer in Asia. And it's an early proof of concept of VR 180. The quality is not great, but it's a $600 camera. That makes it like an R&D tool. And we, yes, we actually, for that Lila Downs video that you mentioned, we had this camera in the other side behind the drummer in the studio and we shot the whole thing with a B camera. So the idea was going to be that the user can switch cameras between A and B in real time while they're watching and Now they have a different perspective and you can see behind the band, you can see the audience that was there. And I'm really into this idea of user agency over perspective in an immersive environment. I don't think it was ready for prime time in terms of the user experience of it, but it's definitely going to be in the next thing that we do. I think that so many people who are activated in this new format for storytelling are going to be voraciously consuming and using these tools to further their art form and experiment. And we're talking in like a matter of like three, four months, you know, like a hyperspeed dawn of cinema kind of. That's I think the real opportunity here. Now I'd love to like shift and like ask you, what's been your experience of Apple immersive stuff so far?
[00:41:26.328] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think that it's been super high resolution, high fidelity, and it's really amazing to see when you have a screen that can exhibit all those pixels. It's always been in the 360 video sphere where they're always capturing more pixels than they'd be able to display. And I think it's getting to the point where there's probably going to be diminishing returns to do like too much higher resolution. I mean, there's always going to be like increasing resolution, but I think it's at a sweet spot where it feels really amazing in that Apple, in terms of their business strategy, has tended to do a series of these different exhibitions and show them. It doesn't sound like from what I hear from the producer community that they're funding too much content from independent creators. And so they were involved with Atlantic Productions to produce this adventure series. They've been mostly focused on 180 and not really 360 at all. And when I talk to folks like Felix and Paul, most of their content's 360. And so if they're gonna have it on the Apple platform, then they have to make these creative decisions that they weren't making when they were producing that content. And so there's kind of like a preference towards 180 over 360. which there's a number of different 360 video content pieces that I just watched heading up to South by Southwest, like Shelter is an example. It's 360 video, which I think that you can pick a perspective and then there's more of that creative control. But then I think there's a magic of the 360 video where you let the audience dictate where to look. But as you do the edits, you can sort of guide the focus based upon moving objects or other ways that you can guide attention more. But for the most part, they've been avoiding the 360 video and doing 180 because of the lenses and the cameras that are out there that allows you to do a little bit more cinematic productions, like say Currents, that's also going to be showing and premiering at South by Southwest, which I understand is also going to be on your application. It's really beautiful, hyper-stylized, feels like a music video production. with some more cinematic CGI point cloud visualizations that are really spectacular as well. So blending all these other volumetric capture techniques that we've seen, but also kind of rendering them out to the format of the spatial video. There's been the evolution of the grammar for immersive storytelling that has that level of interactivity agency, these more theatrical staging techniques of how to guide attention within the context of 360. You don't have that as much within 180, so... I almost feel penalized when I turn my head when I'm watching like submerged because of the stereoscopic effects are so distinct. There's a way in which that Apple and the people have been producing those. They funded a lot of people who really didn't do a lot of homework. Well, I should take a step back. Some of the pieces were produced without a lot of knowledge of what's come before. I think Charlotte Knickerberg and the pieces that she's done for adventure is doing an amazing job. That's someone who's coming from the background of producing a lot of immersive content, but it's almost like they gave a lot of resources to filmmakers who have never produced any immersive content rather than leveraging the independent creators that have been a part of the industry for a long time. So that'd be my biggest critique is that having been leveraging the knowledge that's been cultivated and I would like to see them funding more independent creators rather than just these initial things. But I don't know if they're trying to avoid the type of endless pit of funding creators forever and trying to find new business models for them to become a little bit more sustainable. But it's really this chicken and egg problem where... there isn't enough people that have the headsets to be able to create a viable ecosystem to really sustain people. And so the funding of the content would help catalyze and grow the industry quicker if there was more funding available for these different types of projects. But I think with Apple Vision Pro, for the most part, immersive video, 360 video has been, even to this day, people argue that it's not VR, not immersive. And so I feel like there's still a lot of ways that the storytelling techniques and the grammar is being developed by people who are experimenting in that cinematic tradition and context, and that that's going to feed back into the other contexts of XR. So I don't have that same split of saying it has to be CGR, it has to be like interactive in order for it to be real VR, true VR. But I think what I'm starting to see is that there are the next phase of Cameras and content and people pushing the grammar even further from what I've seen before. And it's really exciting to see this kind of next renaissance of creators who are just coming into the field. But my critique is always that there's a lot of content that's been created. It's not always easily accessible for people to see. So it's understandable for why they may not always have been able to watch it. But there's been a lot of content that has been created that people can learn from.
[00:46:02.699] Adam Lisagor: Yeah. No, I agree with all of that. And I think Apple's strong opinion that this is a 180 device and not a 360 device or a 180 platform or display and not a 360 display is the correct one, in my opinion. It's a sit down and experience thing. sitting down. And that's different from the meta devices, of course. Those are gaming devices, you know? And I don't mean this as a pejorative. Both my kids love the MetaQuest and they play Gorilla Tag as often as they can. Those are move around devices. You're not penalized for turning around. There's more stuff there. More game to play. But that's not what immersive cinema is. I think that immersive cinema follows a lot of the same conventions as traditional cinema. And it doesn't require user agency in the sense of being able to look around and find the story in other parts of the space you're in. I think the story continues to be right in front of you. You just happen to be right up there inside of the screen instead of detached from it by 10 or 20 feet. And there's so much opportunity in that agency. It's a different type of agency. It's an emotional agency. And it requires a strong subjective voice. And I think that that's the difference between this current era of immersive filmmaking and the previous, what I would call VR filmmaking. is that in my estimation, I think you would know a lot more about this than I would, but in my estimation, which is that of a dilettante, I think that VR filmmaking was all about constructing a space and then inviting the viewer to really have agency of motion to discover what was in that space of 360. And that's more like a game than a film. Yeah. And maybe this is a preference thing, but I'm not a gamer. I love being shown where the story is. And at a level of fidelity and technical sophistication and immersion, I think there's a lot of room for the story to be elevated now. But that doesn't mean that films are going to be better and immersive. I mean, a story is story. It doesn't require technical specs or constraints. But it will be new. I think it'll be a new type of story. That's what's exciting to me as a filmmaker. It's what's exciting to me as a technologist and as somebody who's building a business. And we're just at the very beginning, of course. This is such a small field right now. It's about to get a lot bigger.
[00:48:47.113] Kent Bye: Just a quick follow-on, do you have any short-term or long-term plans to show 360 video on your platform, or is it mostly front-facing 180 content that you're focusing on at least right now?
[00:48:59.016] Adam Lisagor: I think as soon as Apple decides to prioritize 360 in their own UX, then that would be when we would make it available in our app.
[00:49:08.055] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah, because I'm thinking of a piece that you have, it's called Limbatopia, that has a VR version that's 360, like fully immersive, and then has like more of the dome version that's more monoscopic. And have you seen the full VR version of that piece?
[00:49:22.400] Adam Lisagor: Not the full piece, no.
[00:49:23.760] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah, because there's some depth of field stuff that's really quite interesting that I feel like there's parts of that piece that work better in the fully immersive version. And it feels like an adaptation to me when I watch it on the other dome and planetarium screen. So anyway, just I recommend checking out that one and just seeing for yourself the differences. And I'm an advocate for having fully immersive stuff, but I can understand with existing platforms. way that it's set up. It feels like it's a training wheels for people that are just getting into the industry to watch things that they don't have to really do a lot of extra work and that it's a good first step into the more immersive pieces. Right. Yeah. I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling and spatial computing might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:50:12.915] Adam Lisagor: Yeah, so one thing that comes to mind is that I think what happened in the video age, I would say, let's call it the video age where magnetic tape was available for content. So call it the late 70s to the 80s through the 90s, pre-digital. That was a tremendous constraint. Channels for distribution suddenly grew and scaled because we had things like cable TV. We were still watching everything on a small box. the tools for capture became democratized and suddenly we could shoot a lot more of stuff than when we could on film. And so I think what happened necessarily aesthetically because of that new freedom paired with the ultimate constraint of distribution and display was just that like everything became more frenetic and we were trying to cram more signal into the same size box. And I'm talking about like faster cuts and like the video age, the real MTV aesthetic as it was known. And, you know, we became like as a society, we became used to this idea of everything faster and being crammed into our eyeballs and our ears so that we necessarily had to acclimate to that pace of information. And in a way, it was preparing us for the oncoming digital age. where that became world scale and real time, right? No longer the constraint of like 60 channels delivered to cable TV. It was everywhere all at once. So I think the story of media up to this point has been everything crammed in as fast a pace as possible. And I think we've reached the limits of our ability to receive this information to the detriment of society, to the detriment of culture, to the detriment of civility and discourse. And counterintuitively, the opportunity in the immersive storytelling format is for us to sit down, slow way the hell down, and appreciate what's in front of us, whether that's the natural world or the pace of our own thoughts and opportunity for self-exploration and opportunity to discover story at our own pace. And what does this remind me of as a previous storytelling format? Reminds me of theater, right? So I feel like this is an opportunity to reintroduce the world, reintroduce our culture of media to something that's a lot slower, potentially healthier for us. And maybe we'll offer some real opportunity for growth. And I think that it's like, you know, a step back into the elemental that's going to propel us forward into a new space. That's what I'm really excited for. So I don't know. I'm not a theater guy. I never was. But I love people and I love stories. And I can't wait to see the stories that happen in this new format because I think it's going to be really good for us.
[00:53:27.401] Kent Bye: Awesome. Was there anything else that slept and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:53:31.263] Adam Lisagor: No, I mean, just check it out, check out the app because it's interesting and I want to hear what you think. And it's been slow growth. Like this is a nascent idea. It's bootstrapped. It's hard to make software. It's hard to make software and media experiences. And we're just getting started. We're out there hitting the pavement, raising money to build this bigger. And if you use the app, write us at feedback at sandwich.vision and tell us what you think of it. If you have any requested features, anything that's particularly exciting for you in the future. Yeah, that's it. We love hearing from our users. It's the best.
[00:54:12.202] Kent Bye: Nice. And any recommendations of, I know there's a number of different paid experiences that you have on your app, also some free. What would you recommend people check out if they want to see the best of content that's featured on your app?
[00:54:26.377] Adam Lisagor: So recombination is a really interesting one. It's just trippy. I love the nature stuff, but I really go for any of the sort of like more abstracted psychedelic feels. But I would say like Reef Studio produced this one called Recombination that's just beautiful.
[00:54:43.445] Kent Bye: It's got like fractal 3D art. Is that right? Yeah.
[00:54:46.666] Adam Lisagor: Yeah, exactly.
[00:54:48.570] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I would recommend the Fungi Web of Life. That was really spectacular. That was one that was definitely worth the time and money to see. Really amazing and stunning. And overall, just really exciting to see an app like this to be able to feature some of this other independent content that's being produced in this space. And looking forward to see if this is like a new vector for people to exhibit. Like you are showing Currents coming out soon, right? Yeah.
[00:55:13.329] Adam Lisagor: Correct. Yeah. Well, not until after South by Southwest, but Jake Olson, the filmmaker, we're working with him to basically at the festival, there'll be, I think, six devices there. They'll all be preloaded up with basically a bespoke version of theater that uses theater as the player for the VR 180 film.
[00:55:35.672] Kent Bye: Okay, great. So I had a chance to take an early look at that. That's another example of a highly stylized indie production that is really quite stunning. And yeah, it's great to see that that type of content will be featured on the platform after South by Southwest as well. So the type of creators that I've been covering for the last decade, it's nice to see another vectors for this type of work to get out there into the world.
[00:55:57.342] Adam Lisagor: So thank you. Yeah, our goal is to sort of at this point be an early version of HBO, home box office, you know, creating a platform for beautiful works to be presented and valued. That's kind of where we are spiritually right now as a business.
[00:56:14.212] Kent Bye: Yeah, and Chris Milk's Within was really doing that in the early days of VR, really curating a lot of that. Atlas V is doing that for other immersive content, interactive content. But yeah, in terms of the cinematic tradition and these types of 180 videos, dome content and other pieces that really shine on the Apple Vision Pro, it's nice to see that they'll have an outlet for folks to be able to see them as well. So Adam, thanks again for taking the time and joining me here today on the podcast to help break down all the things that you're working there on your app called Theater.
[00:56:43.390] Adam Lisagor: Thanks so much for inviting me on Kent. It was really great to talk to you. Big fan.
[00:56:47.819] Kent Bye: So that was Adam Lissacor of Sandwich Vision, and we're talking about his Apple Vision Pro app called Theater. So of a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, when I was editing through this and kind of listening to the back and forth, when Adam was really advocating that, he thinks that Apple made the right decision to not look at 360 video. And I was specifically thinking around a project called Limitopia that I had seen the planetarium or dome version and There was aspects of the VR version that I just preferred just because there's more use of depth of field. And I don't know, there's just something around like 360 video that maybe I have a personal preference over, but sometimes I really enjoy not having to know where specifically that I need to be looking. Like I'm generally going to be looking in the right direction. And so with the 180 video, there's less cognitive load, less agency that you have to move your body around and try to find the focus of attention. And, you know, there's less likelihood that you're going to be missing something. And so with all those constraints, I think there is a new possibility for filmmakers to start to push forward the grammar of spatial storytelling. That is honestly more from the tradition of the 2D cinematic tradition. When I was talking about how there were some projects that were funded by Apple that seemed to be coming from people who were coming from that cinematic tradition without a lot of experience within the context of spatial video, it could be just that my own orientation for how I've seen 360 video filmmakers have fleshed out some of the grammar of maybe a little bit more long shots, more durational takes. And with a piece like submerge, they had a lot of closeups. They had a lot of ways that they were tilting camera, a lot of ways that I would say like violate the best practices for what I would want to see in the project like that. And it can be a little bit disorienting when you're actually in the context and a space and they're, doing over-the-shoulder shots rather than having both characters in frame. So there's a number of different conceits that I'm not convinced is a one-to-one translation. And a number of the different projects that Apple have funded so far seem to be coming from people that are coming more from that 2D film background. And some of that grammar and language, in my mind, doesn't necessarily fully translate over. There's this concert, a one-on-one concert, that piece that I just watched on Apple Vision Pro on Apple TV. And they had some super close-up shots. I was like, wow, this feels super claustrophobic. And I'm not quite convinced that this is the type of intimacy that they were actually trying to cultivate. Again, it could be just that it's an accommodation where I'm not used to seeing that or that people like really resonate with that. But I just found like these types of conceits that are coming from more of the 2D film. That's what I mean that the people that are being hired to produce that, that they don't seem to always have this rooting of what has come before in terms of some of the affordances of spatial storytelling. So I'm willing to really listen to what Adam is advocating here for that, that he thinks that Apple made the right decision and that I suspect that's probably the right track. It's certainly easier to produce with people behind the camera because when you have 360 video, you basically can't really have anything. Any crew or directors in the scene, but with having like the 180, then you can basically use a lot of the same types of cinematic techniques that were not as easy to do within 360 video because you can have like off screen stuff with a crew and the center photographer, the director and everything else like that. So I'm really excited and encouraged by some of the different pieces that I'm starting to see. And especially with Apple Vision Pro as a distributor of this type of content, I still think there's not necessarily a viable ecosystem with a critical mass of people and enough people buying it to really support these types of efforts. But there's some really amazing work that's happening. I mean, this piece, Fungi, Web of Life, that was featuring the work of Merlin Sheldrake is really quite excellent. If there's one piece that I would recommend, go see that. because i just think it's a beautiful time-lapse photography macro photography of fungi it's absolutely exquisite and also the themes of fungi it's just really amazing to learn about it but also just to see a lot of the footage in the context of the special video And, you know, there's a number of different other genres of like nature documentaries, if you're into that, or educational type of material that tends to be a little bit more planetarium type of content. There's space content and then a number of different, more abstract music videos. There was some narrative pieces that I don't think it's necessarily like the strongest writing in terms of story content. but it's still interesting to see some of the pieces that are out there that are pushing the edge using metahumans and motion capture. And, you know, the end of this piece has a lot of like behind the scenes footage that goes into the process for how they made it. So I think there's ways that it's interesting to say, okay, if you were to only use Unreal Engine and put together this story and that using some of the latest motion capture technologies, So for me, it's like interesting from a technical perspective, but from a story perspective, it was not all that compelling. But I do think that I prefer having some narrative bits. And sometimes when it's just a bunch of music with visuals, I have to either like the music or I kind of want to have other narrative bits that are keeping me engaged with the content. So it's still very early days. It's just really cool that there's a platform that you could Start to take some of the content that you'd normally see at a planetarium or the front facing type of domes rather than the domes That you're looking up at although they do have that as well But it's more of like you're facing forward and it's kind of like tilted at a certain angle That's the dome experience that I've seen so far so Yeah, in the Plex server, I didn't have time to actually like set that up or test it or anything. So I don't know how well of an integration that is. But it does seem that if you do have a large library of content that you want to make available through this Plex app, then there's other integrations to be able to go and have your own personal movie theater as well. So, and with the social features, I think that's something that is going to be really exciting to test out just to see how much of like a theater going experience is going to be replicated by having people that you know, in the theater as well. So very much reminds me of kind of the early days of big screen, but with a much higher resolution of the screen and to be able to start to recreate some of these planetarium or dome experiences, or just like this large screen, or even just like the stereoscopic content that's out there with the spatial video. Just really cool to have a platform that is really championing that type of content. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listed supported podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
