Apple's iPhone 15 launch was largely deemed a snoozer and panned for its lack of “innovation." For those myopically focused on the gadget expecting it as the source of Apple’s next big thing, the Apple’s Fall event was pedestrian at best, colored with incremental improvements to the gadget in what appears to be largely a camera race.
Indeed it was the iPhone 15 Pro’s camera that delivered. The big revelation was not the 5x optical zoom on the Pro Max that techno pundits will quickly remind you trails the 10x optical zoom of Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S23 Ultra unveiled earlier this year at Galaxy Unpacked 2023 in San Francisco.
It was Spatial Video.
As I cited in my WWDC article back in June of this year on the launch of Vision Pro, Apple’s upcoming mixed reality headset, the Spatial Camera, as awkwardly (arguably creepily) as it was presented, promises to solve the biggest issue that has held back XR headsets -- content.
While cameras on XR, in particular AR glasses, are not a novel thing, volumetric capture is which is what the Spatial Camera does. The Spatial Camera implementation on the Vision Pro is not entirely publicly known but likely uses its two forward-looking cameras as well as True Depth and solid state LiDAR sensors to compose the high quality volumetric video a small number of analysts and media sampled in Cupertino.
On the iPhone 15 Pro, the Spatial Camera is implemented using the 12MPUltra Wide and the 48MP Main cameras. It’s not known if the iPhone 15 Pro’s LiDAR sensor has a role in the composition of Spatial Videos but if it does it is the only one fitted on a smartphone today.
Why is Spatial Video on the iPhone 15 Pro a big deal? It puts volumetric content creation in the hands of every iPhone 15 Pro user enabling them to capture content in an entirely novel format that will deliver new volumetric media experiences both visual and audio.
Otherwise, the only way to create Spatial Video would be to put on a Vision Pro and switch on creepy dad mode. This would not only be limiting but would prevent the rapid mass market adoption of Spatial Video and its media format that Apple will realize when it flips the switch and enables it on every iPhone 15 Pro.
That is huge on many levels and could very well position Apple to reinvent live and personal media experiences and communications. This is certainly a bigger deal than the tired debate over who has the best optical zoom.
As the rest of the industry had been riding the dramatically diminished metaverse bandwagon in search of the killer dopamine hit in the realm of virtual escapism, it is obvious that Apple was looking the other way with Vision Pro. It bet on a more grounded direction, reality.
In many ways, Spatial Video on the iPhone 15 Pro is the accelerator for making Apple’s XR strategy the revolution that we long anticipated and maybe expected.
Maybe the next big thing is not a fantasy metaverse built on Web3. Just maybe the next big thing is us.
That’s powerful.
Leonard Lee is the founder and managing director of neXt Curve, a research advisory firm focused on Information and Communication industry and technology research. He has worked as an executive consultant and industry analyst at Gartner, IBM, PwC and EY and has advised leading companies globally on competitive strategy, product and service innovation and business transformation. Follow Leonard on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/leonard-lee-nextcurve