Mike Swanson

YouTube launched a native app for Vision Pro: apps.apple.com/us/app/youtu.... With 3D 360 and VR180 support. Also signed-in experiences with subscriptions, playlists, watch history, etc.

Good discussion with John Gruber and Brent Simmons on The Talk Show about my recent Backseat Software article (starting around 1:36:20): daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/...

OpenImmersive 1.6: now playing side-by-side and over-under: medium.com/@portemantho...

Imagine your car pulling over mid-drive to ask, “How’s your experience so far?” Ridiculous…until you realize that’s exactly how many apps behave now. How we normalized being interrupted by the products we bought to do work. Backseat Software: blog.mikeswanson.com/backseat-sof...

Apple just released an update to their Apple Spatial Audio Format - Production Suite (AAX). Find it here: developer.apple.com/download/all/

Resolution limit of the eye — how many pixels can we see? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Apple Immersive Media event livestreams for Day 1 (tomorrow/Tuesday) and Day 2 (Wednesday) will be available to watch on the Apple Developer YouTube channel: Day 1: www.youtube.com/live/leGqoF8... Day 2: www.youtube.com/live/4V_7-1b...

Apple is hosting an upcoming event at the Cupertino Developer Center from October 21–23 on creating immersive media experiences for visionOS. Attend in-person or online: developer.apple.com/events/view/...

Heads-up! Apple released its latest Immersive video, MotoGP Tour De Force, a 30-minute documentary that follows rider Johann Zarco during the French Grand Prix at Le Mans this year. tv.apple.com/us/movie/mot...

The 4th episode of "Wild Life" for Apple Vision Pro, titled "Orangutans," is now streaming: tv.apple.com/us/episode/o...

Hugh Hou and his $30K Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuBn...

Andrew Gisch, co-founder of The Immersive Company, talking about the camera they’re releasing this year: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR6o...

Anthony Maës posted a great overview of spatial and immersive technical announcements from WWDC25 along with updates to his OpenImmersive 1.4 project: medium.com/@portemantho...

A fantastic introduction to spatial and immersive formats by @addey.com. Definitely worth your time: developer.apple.com/videos/play/...

Apple released some WWDC25 sessions on spatial and immersive video playback in visionOS. You can find them here: developer.apple.com/wwdc25/sessi...

Bono: Stories of Surrender (Immersive) is now available for Vision Pro and clocks in at a full 1h26m: tv.apple.com/us/movie/bon...

I hope you enjoy my new post explaining how to use the open source x265 encoder and the NVIDIA Video Codec SDK to encode stereoscopic video with MV-HEVC. As always, it's a bit technical, but I hope you learn something useful in the process: blog.mikeswanson.com/mv-hevc-with...

Dean Zwikel just announced his Apple Immersive Video Creator (AIVC) tool for Windows 10/11. His free tool encodes stereoscopic video to MV-HEVC and includes the spatial metadata (vexu) necessary for playback on Apple Vision Pro. Great job, Dean! groups.google.com/g/aivc

Apple just released a new Immersive video episode in their Adventure series titled Hill Climb: tv.apple.com/us/episode/h...

10 years ago today. My app, Halftone 2 (a custom build), running on the Apple Store demo units. So long ago!

A reminder that my spatial tool can inject/modify Apple MV-HEVC Stereo Video (vexu, hfov) metadata keys without re-encoding. I mention this, because more people are starting to experiment with other tools like libx265 and NVIDIA's Video Codec SDK v13: blog.mikeswanson.com/spatial_docs...

Ateme and Focal Point VR announce live MV-HEVC 8K streaming to Apple Vision Pro: www.ateme.com/press/ateme-... www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_qt...

Heads-up! NVIDIA has added hardware-accelerated stereoscopic MV-HEVC support in their Video Codec SDK 13.0: developer.nvidia.com/blog/enablin...

I'm repeating my strong recommendation to check out Prima Immersive on Apple Vision Pro. When I talk about immersive video being the art of convincing you that you're someplace else, this is a perfect example. Absolutely one of the best immersive videos I've seen.

The video and slides for Anton Khirnov's FOSDEM 2025 technical talk on "Multiview decoding in libavcodec and FFmpeg CLI" is now available: fosdem.org/2025/schedul.... Thanks to @vimeo.com and Meta for sponsoring Anton's work! @ffmpeg.org.web.brid.gy

As someone with total, multi-sensory aphantasia (the inability to voluntarily experience mental imagery), this is a good, short introduction to the topic from Quanta Magazine: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I4K...

Check out the latest Apple Immersive video, Man vs. Beast, on your Vision Pro: tv.apple.com/ca/movie/man... Open that chute!

Thanks to @pcgamer.com for covering Activision's false permanent ban issue. False bans continue to happen every day, and it's being ignored. The story of one player's 763-day legal quest: www.pcgamer.com/games/call-o...

Upcoming MV-HEVC talk at FOSDEM 2025 regarding multiview decoding in libavcodec and the ffmpeg CLI: fosdem.org/2025/schedul...

The story of a two-year fight to reverse a false permanent ban in Activision's Call of Duty, including a court case and a complete lack of evidence. This is a real issue that continues to affect innocent players every day: antiblizzard.win/2025/01/18/m...

NVIDIA's just-announced GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs include encode/decode support for "multiview-HEVC (MV-HEVC) for 3D and virtual reality (VR) video." It's great to see MV-HEVC support expanding! blogs.nvidia.com/blog/generat...

Apple Immersive's latest episode of their Adventure series, Ice Dive, is now available for Vision Pro. tv.apple.com/sg/episode/i...

Episode 3 of Apple Immersive Wild Life, Sharks, is now available: tv.apple.com/us/episode/s...

Fellow developers, talk me down from: 1. Writing an overlay for Microsoft Teams to add confirmation pop-ups when you raise your hand or try to leave a meeting. 2. Writing a macOS kernel extension (I know) for client-side access to SMB2/3 file shares...but one that works. They're both bad ideas.

James Cameron and Meta deal to focus on 3D content development: www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

I was talking to someone about my Bez app today, and I ran across this 2016 post by @gruber.foo. I remember how exciting it was to read John's review at the time. Looking back, he was so kind and generous. Thank you, John!

And you thought you understood rainbows: www.youtube.com/watch?v=24Gf...

After 2+ years, false bans continue to plague Call of Duty, Activision refuses to admit that RICOCHET has a problem, and nobody wants to address the issue. If I were to write an update this year, it'd simply be: "more of the same." blog.mikeswanson.com/my-year-long...

Wow! Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary release with updated content is completely free this weekend on Steam: www.half-life.com/en/halflife2.... They've also released a new two-hour documentary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjN.... Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman!

New Apple Immersive content from The Weeknd, "Open Hearts," is now streaming on Vision Pro: www.apple.com/newsroom/202...