Ant Williams is a freediving athlete featured in the third episode of The Adventure Series titled “Ice Dive” that’s co-produced by Apple and Atlantic Studios (formerly Atlantic Productions). In the episode, Williams attempts to swim a world record distance 182 meters under ice, and I wanted to get some additional behind-the-scenes context on his experience as well as what it was like to have the most intense month of his life condensed down into a 15-minute Apple Immersive Video. Williams is a sports psychologist who wanted to put his theories into practice by taking what he calls “positive, calculated risk-taking challenges” that allow him to deal with overwhelming anxiety, and overcome his fears, uncertainty, and self-doubt.
I also wanted to get some additional context on the production of the episode as Apple has otherwise been pretty tight-lipped about the series, launched with which launched with “Highlining” on the same day as the Apple Vision Pro launch on February 2, 2024. Apple Immersive Video is a different format than spatial video. Apple says “spatial videos are captured in 1080p at 30 frames per second in standard dynamic range,” and these are what can be captured by either an iPhone or Apple Vision Pro, and they are displayed in a windowed frame where you see the stereoscopic effects. Apple describes Apple Immersive Video as “a remarkable storytelling format that leverages 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio to transport viewers to the center of the action.“
Apple Immersive Video is much closer to what we’ve seen from the XR industry and VR 180 filmmakers from the past decade, and Apple’s technology is likely derived from their 2020 acquisition of NextVR. NextVR focused on live stereoscopic broadcasts of sports events on VR headsets starting with the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift in 2014.
A lot of the technical specifications of the Apple Immersive Video format have not been officially confirmed by Apple, but there are a couple of breadcrumbs that give us some more details. Thanks to iFixIt’s breakdown of the Apple Vision Pro on February 7, 2024, then we know the microOLED display size is reported as “the lit area totals 3660 px by 3200 px.” 360 Labs’ Mike Rowell wrote a post on March 19, 2024 saying, “Apple Vision Pro’s screens are a whopping 3660 x 3200 pixels per eye. Although they haven’t made any official claims as to the FOV of the headset, 3rd party developers claim that it looks to be around 100° horizontal. With each screen having 3,660 horizontal pixels, this would mean that a 180° immersive experience would need about 6,000 x 6,000 pixels per eye to saturate the display. Apple’s own immersive experiences have been reported at being 4320×4320 per eye at 90fps and in HDR10.“
The reporting of Apple’s immersive experiences was detailed by Mike Swanson, who announced a spatial video tool on March 7, 2024 that leverages the Apple’s AVFoundation to properly encode video into the “multiview extensions of the HEVC codec, known as MV-HEVC” format. Swanson says in his post, “I receive multiple messages and files every day from people who are trying to find the limits of what the Apple Vision Pro is capable of playing. You can start with the 4320×4320 per-eye 90fps content that Apple is producing and go up from there. I’ve personally played up to “12K” (11520×5760) per eye 360-degree stereo video at 30fps.“
Another clue can be found in the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera that was announced on June 10, 2024, which says, “The sensor delivers 8160 x 7200 resolution per eye with pixel level synchronization and an incredible 16 stops of dynamic range, so cinematographers can shoot 90fps stereoscopic 3D immersive cinema content to a single file.“
Incidentally, Currents director Jake Oleson told me that he used Swanson’s tool to create his immersive film after shooting it in 8k on the Canon EOS R5 Camera Body with Canon’s Dual Fisheye lens. Here’s his post-production process that he shared with me, “Once the cut was locked, went back into the source footage and then printed the 8K raw images as ProRes, and then upscaled using Topaz AI to 16K, and then used Mike Swanson’s spatial metadata injector to export at like 400 megabytes per second in the HEVC codec, and then worked with the Sandwich Video guys, Adam and Jose, who were kind enough to create a custom build of their Theater app to stream the film locally, play back the film here for South by Southwest.” Check out my interview with Adam Lisagor for more details on the Theater app. on the Apple Vision Pro.
Apple Immersive Video is one of the more stunning examples of what the Apple Vision Pro is capable of in terms of transporting you into another place. It’s not just the high-resolution display, but also the advancements of spatial audio, which is likely blending multiple types of spatial audio techniques. Be sure to check out my interview with spatial audio engineer Oliver Kadel for some more clues on that front.
But the “Adventure” series is my favorite series that Apple has done so far with Apple Immersive Video, and Williams provides some additional behind-the-scenes context on both the production of his episode, but also his experiences of having his world record attempt captured in an immersive context that transcends the affordances of previous 2D media. It not only evoked a visceral emotional reaction when he watched it, but also is able to share his journey with friends and family in a new way.
You can follow Ant Williams on Instagram @freediveguy. You can also book a free demo to experience Apple Vision Pro at an Apple Store, and also be sure to check out the trailer for Ice Dive below:
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
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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, I'm featuring Ant Williams, who's featured in the third episode of the adventure series on Apple Vision Pro. It's called Ice Dive, and it's a co-production between Apple and Atlantic Studios, formerly known as Atlantic Productions. So Ant is a sports psychologist who really wanted to put his theories into practice. So he adopted this sport called freediving, where you would dive as far as you could down into open waters. He then moved into the fringe of that sport, which was ice freediving, and then attempted a world record of trying to swim the longest distance horizontally underneath ice for 182 meters. And so that's what's featured in the third episode of the adventure series called Ice Dive. So there's a couple of reasons why I wanted to talk to Ant. One is because he started to give a little bit more context to this adventure series, but also just to hear a little bit more about his own experiences as this athlete who's having the most intense month of his life captured and then be relived within this Apple immersive video format to be able to experience himself, but also to share with friends and family. And so he's also looking at what he calls positive calculated risk taking challenges. So he wants to push himself to the edge of his comfort zone where it's allowing him to deal with this overwhelming fear and anxiety and to overcome those fears and certainty and self-doubts in order to achieve the furthest extent of his capabilities. So there's a lot of this behind the scenes, what it was like for him to go through this experience. I highly, highly, highly recommend that you go check out the adventure series episode three with Ant before you listen. But if that's not possible, the first 30 to 35 minutes, we're going to be talking in a relatively spoiler free way about that specific episode. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview for me in the United States happened on Wednesday, March 25th, 2025. And for Ant in Australia happened on Thursday, March 27th, 2025. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:20.130] Ant Williams: Hi, my name is Ant Williams. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and I do a sport called freediving. So it's a sport where you traditionally go out into the ocean and You run ropes down into very deep water, and it's a competition to see who can reach the greatest depth, retrieve a tag, make it all the way back to the surface on one breath. There are a couple of other disciplines. So there's how long can you hold your breath face down, not moving, and guys are doing like seven or eight minutes in that. And then there's this last event, which is how far can you swim underwater on a single breath? Doesn't matter how long it takes, just how far can you swim. And recently... I recorded a film in immersive format for the Apple Vision Pro trying to break the world record to swim the furthest distance ever swum under the ice.
[00:03:06.024] Kent Bye: Nice. And maybe you could give just a bit more context as to your background and your journey into doing all this stuff.
[00:03:13.988] Ant Williams: Yeah, sure. So I grew up as a very non-sporty person. I grew up in music and the church, which my parents were into and not so much on the sports side, but I did love sports. So I went to university and studied to become a sports psychologist. And when I was out working in Europe and around the world, which is cool, I moved into sports like at a great time when there weren't a lot of us around. And so I got to work with some amazing athletes and MotoGP and rugby and a lot of sports that were quite dangerous, like big wave toe and surfing. I realized one day that I was a total fraud. Because here I was teaching all these athletes how to do all this incredible stuff with all these techniques from sports psychology, but everything came from a textbook, not from my own lived experience. So I decided that I should take up a sport, ideally a slightly more dangerous sport, and just start applying what I was teaching other athletes to see if it would work, what would work for myself and what didn't, just to give me a bit more credibility. Like I never wanted to be great at the sport. That wasn't my goal, but I chose freediving. And I found that that was a sport that if you were mentally tough, you could actually go quite far in the sport. So I progressed really quickly. And within a couple of years, I was competing at world championship level. And now I've been competing internationally for over 20 years.
[00:04:35.202] Kent Bye: Okay. And can you talk a bit about your transition into doing normal free diving, which you're just going straight down and then doing like ice free diving and then ice diving where you're swimming more horizontally rather than vertically. Just talk a bit about that transition from where you originally got into free diving and then wanted to branch out into these even more extreme variations.
[00:04:57.642] Ant Williams: Well, I've been doing so much freediving that every year was about going like a meter or two deeper and I was always up against the same people. And then I got this chance opportunity to be on a reality show in New Zealand, actually, where I met like the show ambassador was this guy, Laird Hamilton, a Hawaiian guy. who's an absolute legend in windsurfing and surfing and toe foiling. Like he's a bit older than me, but he's still so relevant and he's still so successful, even though he doesn't compete. Anyway, I got chatting with Laird and said, how do you stay so relevant? And he said, yeah, you get past this whole idea of competition eventually. And you realize that where the funds to be had is to go onto the absolute outside edge of your sport and start playing around. That's when you like learn new techniques, you try new equipment, you get breakthroughs. I was like, damn, I'm so inspired. Where would that be for freediving? I thought the North pole, right? I'm going to go to the North pole and become the deepest van under ice. At least that was my idea. So it all started from there.
[00:06:02.675] Kent Bye: And then were you able to do that?
[00:06:04.642] Ant Williams: No, no, it was going to cost, I think, 350,000 US dollars just to get up to the North Pole and spend like two hours there. So I scaled back my ambition. We went high up into the Arctic Circle with a team of six of us. And I did break the world record. I dove 70 meters under the ice to become the deepest man under ice. And it was still pretty hardcore. It was like minus 30 degrees when we arrived and the ice was nearly a meter thick.
[00:06:36.758] Kent Bye: As I was watching these films, the question does arise as I'm watching it, is that how are these different types of ventures typically funded? I mean, I know that there's competition and you were involved in competition, but do you get sponsors as a part of this film production helping to support these different types of world record attempts? And yeah, just generally, if this is like a career path for you, or is this like a side thing you're doing and you have your day job, but just trying to get a sense of how this all financially works out.
[00:07:03.587] Ant Williams: So in my 20 years of international competition, I once won a wetsuit. And then the guy who organized the competition, he just disappeared. I never got sent my wetsuit. So I think that... In terms of financial remuneration, it's been a pretty poor choice of sport to go into. Sponsors. I've had sponsors over the years. None of them have supported me financially, apart from my first world record attempt. So I've had some wonderful sponsors like Rab from the UK who have out of New Zealand, gave me all my expedition clothing for my first world record attempt. And that was incredible. And so I had lots of great gear, but I didn't necessarily have any finances. The first world record went to become the deepest man on the ice. That was going to cost $30,000. on an absolute shoestring budget to go and do that and so I had no success raising the money so I was going to self-fund it and I was like my poor suffering wife I was like yeah I'm going to go do this record it's going to cost us 30 grand which we didn't really have and then a week out from the world record attempt one of my clients And yeah, I'm not sure if they still want me mentioning who it was, but one of my clients, they came to the party and the managing director said, hey, we're going to fund that record. We don't want you to be out of pocket. And so they tipped in the 30 grand.
[00:08:24.138] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. And so maybe you could just give a bit more context for, you know, you're in this ice diving. It's fairly niche. There's not a lot of other people doing it. How did you come across producers at either Apple or Atlantic Productions to translate these attempts into a whole immersive video?
[00:08:41.789] Ant Williams: Great question. So I wasn't out there actively looking for it. I tried really hard back in 2019 to get people interested, a production company interested in covering my first world record. And there just wasn't a lot of interest. I think it's because it's so niche. I actually thought that that would be an upside. But back then, I think the difficulty also of filming up in that environment where it's so cold and I'm swimming so deep under the ice was so problematic for a production company. So I retired from ice diving after that 2019 world record attempt. And then I got contacted by Atlantic Productions, who were looking to make something really unique for the Vision Pro with their adventure series. But they couldn't tell me back then. They were just like, we can't tell you who this is for or what it's for, but we want to go and shoot something under the ice. Are you up for that? And I remember thinking at the time, ah, not really. Yeah. Like I got my record, I'm retired. And there are these freedivers that are based up in these Nordic countries who are full-time freedivers who specialize in ice diving. Go and talk to them. So I was really convinced that they wouldn't choose me, but somehow they liked my story. They liked the first world record. that I announced the world record attempt before having ever even stepped foot on the ice to do an ice dive before. They liked the sense of I'll just set myself a massive challenge and then work backwards. And so we agreed that I would try to set the challenge for myself to do something I'd never done before, which was just like a world record distance under, along underneath the ice, which the furthest I'd ever swum before under ice was 20 meters.
[00:10:18.454] Kent Bye: What was the previous record?
[00:10:20.744] Ant Williams: 175. And that was held for years. And it was done by a Frenchman who is hands down one of the, if not the best underwater swimmer on breath hold in the world. Okay. And he trained for months to do that record.
[00:10:37.297] Kent Bye: Okay. And so I saw like some clips from the BBC where they had like a clipboard and I think I might've saw the date of like March 31st, 2024. Was that around the time when the swim actually happened?
[00:10:48.789] Ant Williams: Yeah. I'm pretty sure that was the date that I did the swim.
[00:10:50.770] Kent Bye: Okay. So March 31st, 2024. So it sounded like they were, you were preparing though for like a month or two, like maybe just step through. Okay. Atlantic productions comes to you. They want to shoot this. At what point do they start to film and, you know, just kind of walk through from your perspective when things actually started to get on the road in terms of starting to document this attempt?
[00:11:12.395] Ant Williams: So timeline wise, I heard from Atlantic Productions mid-January in 2024. We started a conversation. Like I said, I honestly thought that the chances of selecting me were really low. So I hadn't held my breath for two years and I wasn't inspired enough to think I should start training now. So I didn't. I was just like, they're not going to choose me. So I just kind of waited. And this went on for a few weeks before they selected me. I think it was late February. Well, actually no, it must've been like mid February. Cause I remember thinking they've just said they want to choose me as the lead talent for this. And I've got six or seven weeks before we're filming. Oh no. Like if the previous world record was set after four months of intense training, how am I going to do this? And then halfway through that period of time, I caught COVID. So I really had about four weeks of proper training.
[00:12:07.924] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. That's like the last thing you want when you're trying to swim underwater under ice. And so when you're swimming in the pool there and you're trying to get up to a certain amount of time, just like what were your targets for what you needed to do, what you were trying to train? Because, you know, obviously when you're swimming in the cold water, then... it's going to be tougher and it's not like just swimming in normal room temperature water. So how did you start to translate, okay, how are you going to meet these training goals for you to feel like you were going to be prepared to do this attempt?
[00:12:40.370] Ant Williams: This was a massive dilemma. I was like, okay, the first challenge is how do I get myself ready in such a short amount of time? So the first thing that I came up with is I have to train twice a day, every day, six days a week, and then have one rest day. And I have to monitor myself really closely to make sure that I'm not fatiguing or burning out or recovering in time for the next session. So that was my first challenge. I'm going to try to do this and see how long I can sustain it. And that was probably... The thing that really got me the breakthrough, I've never done that before, but even at the end of that four or five week period, I just was pushing myself harder and harder every day and just going, yeah, bring it on, give me more. So I don't know why, but I was really fortunate in that I was eating well, resting well, supplementing well. And I was also clever in terms of not stressing myself too early. And so what I mean by that is rather than go, right, I've got to get my breath hold up really quickly. I didn't do any breath hold work for the first month. So I've got like five or six weeks to train. And the first month, I'm like, I'm not going to do breath-hold work. I'm going to get my technique perfect. I'm going to build my strength and endurance for a swim this long. Lactic acid tolerance. I'm going to do interval training, sprint work. I'm going to have... So it's not true to say that there's no breath work. There was, but it's what we call submaximal. So if I've got to swim 180 meters, I'm not going to start trying to do that in the pool. I'm just going to swim like 50 meters or up to no more than 100 meters. And I'm going to do that lots and lots and lots of times to get my body ready. So minimal amount of hard breath work, minimal amount of mental taxation, because I wanted to get there and just use my... full resources of mental toughness and resource and what i kept in store to be able to pull this off because a swim like this is only part your physical readiness it's mostly your mental readiness and then it looks like you eventually were doing this dive somewhere in iceland and so at what point did you go to iceland to start training in this like six week preparation time I did a trip up there just to do what we call a technical recce to have a look, make sure that everything was going to be set up the way I was hoping and that we could do it safely. So there were people there from Apple, people there from Atlantic productions, my own safety team that I had appointed and we all got up there, but we only had two days. So I think while I was up there, I was like, okay, I've got to get a really good dive swim done and make sure that I can swim more than 20 meters. But we did it up in this place called Akkari, way up north in Iceland. And I remember the day where I got to get out on the ice and have a go. It was minus 20 degrees centigrade, brutally cold, possibly too cold for ice diving. You would normally do it around plus or minus 2 degrees, not minus 20. And I got a chance to swim 100 meters. So Apple and Atlantic Productions had cut a track for me to do 100 meters on one breath. So that was my first and kind of only training go. It's like, let's go at a hundred meters. And then I was like, after that, I was like, yeah, I'm good. I'm ready to go. Flew back to Australia. And then I had a couple of weeks before coming back to then do the record attempt and the filming.
[00:15:49.592] Kent Bye: Okay. So the filming didn't really start up until like the very days leading up to when you were going to do it, or it seemed like you had some footage of you getting training. And so it sounds like a six week turnaround. When did they start filming?
[00:16:03.792] Ant Williams: Yeah, sorry if I'm a bit hazy on the exact dates, but I remember that there was 10 days of us being in Iceland and filming before the world record attempt. And it looked like we might only get a small window for that attempt, like literally one day. So it was all hinging on that. It was quite a bit of pressure on that day.
[00:16:22.392] Kent Bye: So yeah, you're all leading up to March 31st, 2024 when you're doing this. There's also quite a lot of people. And so can you just speak around like logistically how you set all of this up in terms of your safety divers and your trainer and your support team? It looks like you had some doctors that were there, the people that were like recording. It's a pretty huge production. Not only that, there's all the film people that are also filming everything. So just give me a sense of all the different people and the roles that they were playing as you were doing the actual dive. Yeah.
[00:16:51.809] Ant Williams: Yeah, so I think even on the day of the dive, I think there would have been 70 people involved on that day, maybe. For me, it felt like about 70. So we had a big production set up on the side of the lake with large marquees with chefs in there providing all the lunch, just what you'd expect to happen on a big production. So it was, it felt like a big production, trucks and snowmobiles and heavy earth moving machinery to make sure that the track was laid out correctly. And then if you think about to now go out onto the ice, I would say that there was probably 40 people out on the ice. And a lot of them were going to come underwater at the time when I was going underwater, which is incredible because when you watch the film, it's just this one guy under the ice. But maybe you get a glimmer of a safety freediver. But I had 14 safety freedivers. So we had these holes along the track. Every 20 meters, there's an escape hatch. And you've got to have a safety freediver who's going to swim with me for that 20 meters. And that's it for them. They've got to come up because it's too high risk for them to go further. So they kind of like a relay race. They hand it over to the next person who then follows me for the next 20 meters. So there's 14. Then there's a team above me, the judges who are from CMAS, one from Germany, one from Italy. Then you have like safety. So you have Johnny Sonex, a head of safety above walking long. And then under the water, you also have these video, the filming crew. So you have, I think, two or three cameras. I think we had two cameras underneath, one above. Each camera has two operators, plus a team of people on safety rebreathers running safety for them. Okay, I'll take a breath. Lots of people involved. And yeah, it stunned me how many people were required in order to make a production this sophisticated with this sort of technology.
[00:18:34.488] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when you see the shots, you don't see any of the production crew, especially the drone shots. So the... Either did a creative job of not being in the shot or they erased them in post-production. And so it sounds like when you first got reached out from Atlantic Productions, it's kind of like this mysterious thing that they're asking you to do. At what point did you realize that this was Apple and the Apple Vision Pro and immersive video that was a deeper context for what this was all about?
[00:19:01.351] Ant Williams: maybe only a week or two before I left, you know, it was quite close. I remember the day that Charlotte Mikkelberg, the director of this adventure series, she's like the series director. She said to me, okay, well, this is for Apple and it's immersive format. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, what? This sounds incredible. And she explained to me when people get to watch this, it's not like they're watching a film and it's like they're immersed completely with some of their senses. And they're going to feel like they're sitting down next to Johnny coaching you as you're doing a training swim. They're going to be next to you while you're preparing your final breath for this swim. And it's going to be so immersive that they'll have a, most will have a very strong emotional reaction to it. And probably even think that they've got a relationship with you that you're someone that they know because of this experience that they've had an experience in the film and yeah that just blew my mind i kind of took it as oh yeah she's just putting some spin on this but now that i've experienced watching it and i know that you have as well ken wow yeah it's the most powerful thing i've ever experienced in vr
[00:20:11.995] Kent Bye: What's your first encounter to having any VR experiences? Up to that point, had you even ever had any VR experiences?
[00:20:19.048] Ant Williams: I had, and it's probably underselling it by saying this was a VR experience for me. I think it's like, it's like what I would say. It's a full immersive experience with that spatial audio. So my experience of VR anyway, had just been watching animated or playing animated games with my son, you know, on a headset and going, wow, boy, isn't this realistic? And feeling those things of being immersed in something where your heart rate goes up when you're shooting zombies or whatever, playing like Alex Half-Life. But then the experience wasn't like that for me with the Apple Immersive. It was so far beyond what I was expecting. For me, it felt like I remember when I was a kid watching my first 3D movie. This was the most incredible invention I could have ever envisaged. It was like that moment over again, but with... so much more sophistication around it that it's like filmmakers have this phenomenal new tool at their disposal to be able to tell a story and to be able to transport us quite literally into something where our various senses now believe that they are there in that space at that time.
[00:21:32.793] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, February of 2024 is actually when the public launch of the Apple Vision Pro first come out and be available. Did you happen to have a chance to take a look at any existing experiences on the Apple Vision Pro before you started shooting?
[00:21:46.829] Ant Williams: Yes, so I did. Once I knew that that was the case, then I wanted to go and see one and say Apple gave me an opportunity to watch Highlining, which I think was the first in the Adventure series where you have Faith Dickey taking on a personal challenge in the really high Norway. And watching that, I was like... I almost had to take it off halfway. I was like, oh, I hate heights. And this is like really messing with me. But I couldn't help it. The thing I love is I was watching this highly composed elite athlete on a slack line high above this fjord in Norway. And yes, I was captivated by her. But I could like... look down and I could look up, I could look around and I could see how everything was set up over on the rocks and what our systems were and there's a tent over there. I could look around the scene to such a greater degree than you can normally do with a movie. It's like, what? How is this even possible?
[00:22:46.820] Kent Bye: And so did that give you any insights in terms of seeing the end product of where this was going to end up as you were actually like in production? How did that change the way that you were relating to what these cameras that were stereoscopic? And yeah, I'm just curious if that changed the way that you knew what the end product was going to be and how you were going to try to tell your story.
[00:23:08.639] Ant Williams: To be honest, it just created more questions than answers for me. I remember saying to Charlotte, I don't get how you're going to film this. I swim very fast. How are the cameras going to keep up with how fast I swim? I've seen these cameras and they're not going to be able to move this quick. I wondered around the different shots that would be taken and how she would be able to piece together this story. I even wondered about things like, if you're putting people underwater under the ice with me, are they going to get PTSD? Are they going to feel claustrophobic? It really just raised a lot more questions than answers for me.
[00:23:45.956] Kent Bye: Okay. So you're going through all of this, not knowing how it's going to end up. And you're also, the thing that's really striking to me as you were talking around, like how many people are there, you have your support team, you have your safety divers, but you also have this entire production with Atlantic Productions and Apple Immersive Video that's filming you that they're hoping that everything goes well and you're able to break the record. But Just set the scene as you're sitting there in the water about to go through this world record attempt. What was going through your mind with all the situation and how do you tune everything out or get focused and, you know, just set the context there for actually getting into the water and doing this attempt?
[00:24:24.741] Ant Williams: It was the hardest challenge I've ever faced in freediving. So I've gone for other world records. I've gone into like the final number of athletes in finals and world championships and world cup events where I've been diving to some horrendously deep depth. None of that was as challenging as that moment in ice dive. I'm about to do this swim with this context that I find myself in. The thing I learned, I wouldn't say recently, but it did take me a good 10 or 15 years to learn this lesson, was what I need in order for me to perform well under that sort of pressure. And I used to think I've got to be really focused, really serious. really like, come on, just dig it in and let's just do this. But for me, it's not those things. I've learned that for me, it's just around acceptance that this is going to be uncomfortable and that I'm going to be full with self-doubt, but just to trust myself and my instincts that just trust the process, trust that everything I've done up to this point will mean that I'll be okay. And then in those moments leading up, to the actual start time it's like i've got to create an environment where i find that i'm just so relaxed and having so much fun and not taking myself seriously so the production crew had to listen to days and days and days of kiwi reggae because that's all i would allow to be played such a prima donna I said to the guys who were going to be around me, this might feel really stressful for you, but I don't want you to feel that you should be too serious. Like, take it seriously, but don't be serious, if you know what I mean. I want you to make fun of me. I want you to joke. I want you to laugh at every opportunity. Let's have a laugh so that when I leave my tent to go out into this freezing temperature... that I just feel like we're all here, one big happy family, just going to try something that's going to be really amazing to see if we can pull off. And we achieved that. Like I was literally getting into the ice going, I'd just been laughing my head off in the tent with the guys before coming out. I was like, you couldn't have set this up better for me. I really feel ready to have a go at this. It's not an absence of fear. It's not an absence of pressure, but it's just feeling like I'm in a zone where this is going to be okay. and I'm ready to give it a proper good nudge. So credit to everyone in that team around me. I was just so thrilled.
[00:26:51.687] Kent Bye: Yeah, as I just rewatched it again for the third or fourth time, I was really struck with how you were consistently talking throughout the entirety of the piece of this balance between fear and being able to manage your fears, but also belief and having faith that you'd be able to do it. And so can you talk about this dialectic between the fear and how fear is a protective thing where you can actually protect yourself, but also having a leap of faith that you're going to be able to actually be able to do this, taking these courageous acts. I'd love to hear if you elaborate a little bit about how you're really focusing on these two core emotions of both fear and belief.
[00:27:29.174] Ant Williams: Well, fear is such an important part of our existence for survival. I think it's so hardwired in all of us, this idea that fear serves a purpose, it keeps us safe. But I think that's true up to a point. So if we focus on always playing it safe, not really extending ourselves if we always want a comfortable life where we don't really push then like how do you achieve your dreams how do you really understand what you're capable of what your potential is if you're not prepared to take a risk so i believe in positive calculated risk taking and it just so happens that when we do that it's uncomfortable And a lot of people, they don't want discomfort. I think we live in a time where we have so many creature comforts, it's easy to retreat into a life of comfort. But when we do that, we deny ourselves this ability to learn about ourselves and to stretch and challenge. So for me, fear is good, but I want to recognize that when the fear is there, but I want to get good at moving beyond fear. And so this was a wonderful chance for me to try to do that again with something that would create so much pressure. So for me, when I'm then taking a really significant challenge on the ice dive world record attempt, the way I come at it is this is going to be incredibly uncomfortable. This is going to be a 9 or a 10 out of 10 in discomfort for me with the cold, with the uncertainty, with the self-doubt, with the chance that there is a very real risk that... I could black out under the ice and then have someone have to fire me and pull me up to the surface. I know I'll be safe. And that's what I come back to. If I can do this and the environment is set up and I trust everyone around me that it can be done safely, that even if the worst case scenario, I black out, that everyone's going to have me up at the surface within a few seconds with the best team around me, then is the risk really that high? Now, for a lot of people listening, you'll be going, yeah, you're an idiot. That's as far as we want. But I've been in those situations. I have blacked out in the past and I know that I can recover. It's not a pleasant experience, but I know that I'll recover from that. So I weigh that up. I think about it really carefully. And then I say, is it worth it for me? Will I push myself to put myself in a place where I've got to perform under pressure and something that's going to be extremely uncomfortable with the risk of blacking out? And maybe even making an absolute fool of myself and arse of myself on this film. And for me, it was like, yeah, I'm okay with that. And I discussed it with Charlotte and said, are you okay with it? If one of these outcomes happens, like it's your film, is Apple going to be happy with it? And the sentiment was, yeah, let's give it a proper nudge. So for me, that's why I say it's the biggest challenge I've ever undertaken. And coming out of it, getting into that moment where I was on the ice. Yeah, there's no escaping the fear that was there. But I think that all those years of putting myself through incrementally harder challenges set me up to be able to do this and to be able to trust that when I started swimming, I'm going to be OK.
[00:30:30.607] Kent Bye: And so how does belief play into that as you're also doing this task?
[00:30:36.294] Ant Williams: You know, it's funny. I think there were some mornings I would wake up and I would be so riddled with self-doubt. I was being like, I can't face the day today. And it's in two days I've got to swim this world record. The day before I probably woke up thinking, I feel great. I'm on top of the world. I can crush it. And then the next day, I don't know, something different again. So I couldn't leave it up to chance. I had to do. So it's the way I think about it as I, it was a type of meditation. So I structured my day for the world record attempt day where I gave myself a full hour just to walk around the park by myself. Yeah, it was ice and snow everywhere, but I walked around these freezing conditions and I just worked through the scenarios and I just, rather than obsess on the things that I was afraid about, I kept everything positive around what an opportunity this is, how well my training's gone, how incredible the support team is around me and how safe it's going to be. And so I just thought, well, why don't I just let go and just accept that this is going to be really hard. But if I trust myself that I can cope, I can cope with whatever comes, I'll cope. If I black out, it's okay, I'll cope. If I come up early, you know what? It's not the end of the world. It's still a great story and I'll cope. And I think once you've made that choice and you go, I'll cope with whatever comes up, then that's the kernel. That's the thing that really delivers bravery is just belief in yourself. And I took that into that dive where I was like, I'm freaking out, but I can let go of some of this now and just trust in my own ability and allow it to happen. That was the thing that I think enabled me to do this swim.
[00:32:18.591] Kent Bye: I rewatched it this morning and then I was watching an interview that you did with the BBC in December of last year when this was first being released. I was surprised to hear how within the first 30 meters that you were actually in a lot worse condition than you were hoping to be at that point. Can you just walk through what it was like for you to actually go through the experience of this dive?
[00:32:43.539] Ant Williams: normally when you do a dive under under like say in a swimming pool and you're swimming for i don't know like a big swim so like a big swim in a swimming pool for a competitive freediver is 120 to 150 meters so they might do that occasionally in training if they're really trying to push like an elite freediver and if you take one of those dives I would normally feel the first discomfort around about 70 meters. Now that's quite late. So I've done all these techniques and all this training to be able to swim all this way before feeling uncomfortable. And yet, with all the pressure that's on, it brings that distance forward. Now, I'd forgotten. Like, I'd honestly forgotten. I thought I was going to feel great until 70, 80 meters. And when I got to 30 meters in the world record attempt in Iceland, I felt hideous. Like... I probably instantly put me at a nine out of 10 for discomfort at 30 meters. Like that's the start of the swim. And I couldn't help it. It just sends this instant signal back to my brain saying, oh, oh no, oh no, I'm in real trouble here. you start to wonder what's going wrong and so i started to think have i not put it i didn't take a big enough breath maybe i was too cold i could see water running down the inside of my mask and i thought my mask is flooding i'm not going to be able to see where i'm going i thought why am i having contractions in my chest of pure discomfort after 30 meters how on earth am i going to swim that far And it really threw me. It threw my technique. I don't think my technique was well at the start. I remember the lanyard, my safety line got caught around my fin. I mean, that's on me. That shouldn't happen. I'm making all these mistakes. And then what happens is you say to yourself, you can't make these many mistakes and break a world record. You should abort. And so by around about 50 meters in, I'm thinking I should abort this attempt. It's not going well enough. So yeah, awful.
[00:34:49.588] Kent Bye: And did you abort and do it again, or did you just keep going?
[00:34:52.991] Ant Williams: I kept going. So I figured, I've been told this is probably my only attempt that I'm going to get. And it's not like something was genuinely wrong. It just felt bad. So I wasn't in pain. I wasn't. There was no pain. It was just uncomfortable. And so I thought, how am I going to get through this? So... I thought, here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to swim to, I'm going to swim to halfway and then I'll decide. Because a big mistake that a lot of freedivers make is they quit. As soon as it feels uncomfortable, they quit straight away. And so I have this rule. I never quit straight away. I'm going to keep swimming and really think this through. So I kept swimming. I just kept counting. And then I thought, it's getting worse. Like I feel if this is possible, it feels worse than at 30 meters. And I feel like I don't know really where I am. But I figured it must be around halfway. And so I made a decision. And this might not sound logical to you listening. But to me, what seemed logical at the time was I've got all these people underwater with great expectations watching me. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to show them. For the next 15 meters, I'm just going to show them flawless technique, and I'm going to be relaxed, and I'm going to show them what perfection ice swimming looks like. So that became my challenge. And you know the irony here is that as soon as I made that decision, everything changed. It was almost like I forgot about the discomfort. I focused on this new goal that I had of just this perfection in my technique. And when I did that, within seconds, I moved into something we call a state of flow. Where the discomfort left, I felt energized. I felt in complete control. Time just, I don't know. I didn't have a concept of time anymore because I just kept swimming. And I was like, I don't care. I don't care how long it is. I'm just going to keep swimming. And literally it just felt like in a heartbeat later. And I saw the, we call it a candy cane, a signal to tell me that you're in five meters of the finish and you can come up now.
[00:36:58.131] Kent Bye: Wow. Wow. There's a whole story within the story there. Thanks for sharing all that. And so once you make it, obviously you're at the top of the world. It's an incredible, elated feeling. I'm really curious, the first time that you actually watched you go through this whole journey and process, because I imagine it'd be a little bit like an out-of-body experience because you were swimming and doing this, but all these cameras are looking at you doing this from all these different angles, from up above, from the drone. I'm just curious what that was like for you to... actually watch all this training that you had done and this lifetime of work all be culminated in the process of being able to watch this Apple immersive video of the adventure series.
[00:37:38.966] Ant Williams: I think if I got to watch it back in good old school, normal 2D, then I would have gone, oh, wow, that's great. But that's not what happened. It was like, if you can imagine someone takes a month of your life, the most hard, challenging, high pressure, intense month of your life, condense it down to 15 minutes and said, here, watch this. and put an apple vision pro in your head and literally just transports you back there because of how it does that this magic that it has the 15 minutes was intense i can't think of another word better to explain it than intense I had an emotional reaction to it. I had a physiological reaction to it. My heart rate spiked. I had sweaty palms, a sweaty forehead. At the end of watching it, I had tears welling up in my eyes. I was really quite emotional in watching that experience. I've got to admit, it was one of the most amazing things to be able to relive it like that and be just one tiny step detached from it because I knew the outcome. I'm still here. But just incredible because it tricked my brain to really believing I was back there. And that was remarkable. And I think as an athlete to have that experience is amazing. I can't believe how fortunate I am. I genuinely mean that. Like, I feel like so blessed. I can, I can share it with my kids. I can share it one day with my grandchildren and go, Hey, you get experienced what granddad just did back in the day. And it's never going to get old because it's just so incredible. This technology of how it transports you there.
[00:39:25.030] Kent Bye: Do you have any stories or anecdotes of what it was like for you to share this experience with friends or family?
[00:39:33.499] Ant Williams: I think you can imagine that sharing it with family would be this incredible experience where they finally get to really know and understand at depth what I do. I think I've always shared with them as much as I can and talked to them about the risks involved with my deep diving and all these things about where I dive. But it's explaining. It's not as good as actually taking them there. And so that's been so rewarding for them to go, ah, okay. So that's what you meant. But I was going to say showing some of my friends, that's been, that's been really incredible. I shared a couple of people last week who were, I'd say friends that I've known and only really picked up in the last year. So they're not like lifelong friends, just people who are acquaintances who are becoming friends. And I showed it to them and, And so we haven't really formed deep emotional bonds because it's not like we go back years. But after watching the film, they had tears streaming down their face. One of the first ones came up and gave me this enormous hug, like extended hug, and he just wanted to keep embracing me and just said, I just can't believe what I've just experienced and what you went through and how well you did to come out and survive it. I thought, wow, it's really... It really creates a connection with the person in this experience, in this film that you wouldn't otherwise get. And I think that that's part of the magic.
[00:41:03.250] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of all these new spatial computing and immersive storytelling and immersive video technologies might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:41:13.759] Ant Williams: Oh boy, this has got to be the stuff of standalone podcasts because I think there's so many answers to that question. I'm going to, I guess, answer it somewhat narrowly and selfishly around an area that I'm excited about. So an area I'm excited about, I know that one of the football stadiums has now invested in putting immersive technology throughout the stadium and I can imagine, and I think it's going to happen really soon, where I get to watch something like a football match live and immersive on a Vision Pro where I can see it all around me and complete immersive like I'm on the field. But then I can break out of that view and I can grab a screen and pull it down in front of me where the coach is speaking with the assistant coach around the tactics and the strategy they're going to go in the second half. And then I can shift that out of the way and I can pull up a player who's getting interviewed in halftime. And then I can drop that down. And if I'm into putting on a wage or having a flutter on this match, then at halftime I can look at the odds and how they've changed in the match. all this information and stuff where I get my go, hang on, what's happening in that basketball game over? I can grab that and put that in front for them. I don't know. I can just, it's going to be like this crazy rich experience where you're able to access so much. Oh man, that's going to be, it's going to be hard to beat. Sorry, cinemas. It's going to be the way of blockbuster.
[00:42:37.861] Kent Bye: Awesome. And, and finally, is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:42:45.166] Ant Williams: I think with the immersive community, I just think what a wonderful time to be in this space. I think if you are someone in the immersive community who has a slant for storytelling, this is your time to shine. I went and spoke to a couple of friends I know who are filmmakers in Australia. And I said, have you experienced this? I'm like, oh, yeah, we've heard about it, but no, I haven't really taken the time. I'm like, come on. This is a complete, sorry to use the phrase game changer, but I believe this is at the absolute cusp of filmmaking, of being able to tell stories in a whole different way than we haven't really experienced before this point. So for me, the excitement is this intersection between filmmaking and immersive experience that you can create in and transform people anywhere in the world to spend time with people who are just on another trajectory in their lives and find those intersections. And wow, I think it's the coolest time to be someone who works in immersive for the potential that this brings, whatever field or whatever element or angle that you've got in virtual, what's being opening up to you, you've got to go and explore it and embrace it.
[00:43:59.750] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Ant, thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast. I really enjoyed watching through your episode of Ice Dive on Adventure Series for Apple Immersive Video. And yeah, just really inspiring to hear your story and to see you really push yourself to the limit like that as someone who's in their 50s and really just still trying to challenge yourself and push the edge. And yeah, it's just a real pleasure to watch the video and to see that month of your life condensed down to the 15 minutes, but also to have an opportunity to chat with you today to... hear a little bit more of your journey and what it was like to be a part of all of this. So thanks again for joining me to help break it all down.
[00:44:34.890] Ant Williams: Thank you. I really enjoyed that chat. Great questions.
[00:44:39.714] Kent Bye: So that was Ant Williams. He's a ice diver and sports psychologist who was featured in episode three called Ice Dive of the Adventure Series, which is co-produced by Apple and Atlantic Studios. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, it's just super inspiring to hear all the things that Ant was doing in order to deal with both his fears and to juxtapose that with his belief. On the one hand, he is trying to push his edge of comfort, overcoming his fears, all of his self-doubts, and at the same time still have enough belief that he can achieve his dreams. And so he calls these types of challenges that he sets up for himself, these positive calculated risk-taking challenges. where he's able to chase his dreams and push himself into these uncomfortable spaces where he can learn more about himself to stretch and challenge and move beyond his fears and cope with whatever comes up. Really resonating with that right now, just in terms of dealing with, as I wave my hands all around, all of the stuff that's happening in the world today. I think we all can take some insight into finding ways of dealing with this overwhelming fear and anxiety in the world today and still keep on track with what we want to achieve in our lives. In the process of talking to Ant, I wanted to get just a little bit of sense of not only the logistics of the timing of when all this was happening, because it was kept secret for him to what degree he was even going to be involved with these Apple immersive video up until the week before he was about to go out and start to shoot, which it sounded like they shot for about 10 days leading up to the world record attempt that happened on March 31st, 2024, which is a little over a year ago now. And yeah, just to hear the impact of what it was like for him to have the most intense month of his life captured on Apple immersive video, and then to be able to watch it back and then share it with friends and family. It sounds like a pretty unique and intense experience. I would imagine that a little bit like an out of body experience where you're witnessing yourself of your past self, but you have all of your memories of being in these locations. And for him, he was taken right back to those locations because he, There is a quality of the Apple immersive video that does transport you into these different locations. I think the other thing that's interesting about this conversation is that I think it speaks to this broader trend of this renaissance of 180 degree immersive filmmaking. VR filmmaking started with 360 video and Adam Lissagor, an interview that I did. In episode 1528, he starts to describe how he sees that a VR headset is really tuned for people who are wanting to have high agency type of experiences. And so with 360 video, you can have the agency to look all around and it becomes a little bit of a game to see what you can see. But in terms of the filmmaking grammar, there's still ways of directing attention and using sound and movement and lighting. But Overall, it's just a lot more difficult to produce and to consume. And so now with cinematic 180, this is something that as I was digging back and looking at some of the evolution of this really started with Google and YouTube VR announced this new VR 180 format back in June of 2017. And then at CES 2018, they came out with a couple of cameras. And that started this pivot from 360 over into 180. And I think NextVR had already sort of done 180 just because they were just doing sports. And when you're watching a sports event, you're not necessarily like turning around and looking behind you. And so they were using their format to basically be front facing 180 video as well. And so that's the company that Apple acquired in 2020 that is likely the genesis of a lot of the Apple immersive video technology and streaming and everything else likely had different patents and is derived from that acquisition. But, you know, there isn't a lot of information that's out there around this Apple immersive video format. In my write-up, I go into a little bit more details into the specifics of the format. There were a couple of blog posts that I found helpful. One from Mike Rowell from 360 Labs, where he was talking around, like, if this is around the size of the display, then you can basically double that resolution in order to make sure whatever you're capturing is fully saturating the display resolution. And then Mike Swanson had created this metadata injector, but also this tool that you can use on Apple to actually encode into the MV HEVC, which is the multi-view extension of the HEVC codec. And that's something that is a part of the AV Foundation and I believe is what the theater app is also using locally on their application to be able to play currents that was showing at South by Southwest XR Experience. So my interview with Jake Olson that I did in the previous episode, 1556, Jake starts to lay out a little bit more of a DIY pipeline for producing Apple immersive video. He was using a kit less than $5,000 from a Canon R5. He was using the dual fisheye lens from Canon. Canon released a dual fisheye lens October of 2021. And at that point, you could put this really high quality lens onto like a Canon R5 camera and capture 8K stereoscopic 180 video. So that was being shot on 8K and then using upscaling with Topaz AI, basically having this alternative pipeline where you can do a little bit more of a DIY production of Apple immersive video. And then after that, with the Apple immersive video coming on to the scene, we've also had the Blackmagic URSA Cinema Immersive Camera that was announced on June 10th, 2024. And in their announcements, they say that this sensor can capture up to 8160 by 7200 resolution per eye with a pixel level synchronization and incredible 16 sops of dynamic range. So center photographers can shoot at 90 frames per second stereoscopic 3D immersive cinema content onto a single file. So in a lot of ways, the evolution of VR 180 into Apple immersive video now, there's a lot of cameras that are out there. And whatever happens with the future of the industry, this kind of represents a new cinematic format that is kind of like the blend between 2D traditional cinematic techniques, but also taking into consideration all the VR inspired considerations with motion sickness and video. being able to really transport you to another place. And so it's kind of like a hybrid format that I'm starting to see a lot more momentum behind. And I think the adventure series is a great example of that. In fact, it's my favorite series that Apple has done so far. So we're starting to see more and more of the tools and pipelines to be able to produce this type of high resolution cinematic 180 degree content. And so I expect to see a lot more of it on both the Apple Vision Pro and this is something that Meta has had for a number of years on their MetaQuest TV application but I don't believe that they have continued to fund a lot of new content and they certainly have a lot of content that has been produced some of them actually also by Atlantic Studios there's a number of different David Attenborough pieces that they've released over the years and I did an interview with Conquest of the Skies back from Venice Immersive 2023 and And also, I did do an interview with Oliver Cadell, who has worked on doing spatial audio on a number of these different Apple Immersive Video projects. That's in episode 1522. And there isn't a lot of detail specifically around the spatial audio innovations for Apple Immersive Video. But one of the things that Oliver said is that even if it's 180, you're still able to do a 360 degree spatial audio experience specifically. So they're able to still produce a complete spatial audio sound field that isn't necessarily limited by that 180. So the specifics of exactly what Apple is doing with that are still unspecified, but it sounds like it's a unique mix and blend of spatial audio. So definitely check out some of these different Apple immersive videos and pay attention to the sound design as well. So again, definitely check out the Adventure series. All of it is freely available on Apple TV that you can go check it all out. And they've got a number of other different series that they're producing as well. And we might start to see other people starting to use that as well. I know with the theater application for Apple Vision Pro, they're able to display that if it's downloaded and local to the hard drive, but doing the different streaming solutions, I'm not sure if there's anyone else other than Apple that's able to do that just yet. 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 enjoyed 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 could become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
