Sandwich Launches Theater for Vision Pro (and Will Livestream The Talk Show Tomorrow)

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Earlier this year, Sandwich Vision introduced its first-ever app with the debut of Television. The app lets you watch content on a range of virtual TV sets that you can pin in your real-world environment through Vision Pro.

Television supports viewing your own video files as well as content from YouTube. You can even watch Television with friends synchronously over spatial FaceTime on Apple Vision Pro.

Sometimes, though, you just want to enjoy a film in a proper movie theater setting. What if you could do that for every movie? Enter Theater: the new Apple Vision Pro app that transports you to the perfect venue for movies.

Theater will let you experience the theatrical cinema release feeling (even if the original Star Wars film isn’t showing at your local movie chain). Want to watch a movie at the same time with friends or family who can’t be together in person? Spatial FaceTime makes that possible in Theater.

You know the immersive theater environments in Apple’s own TV app and Disney’s VisionOS app? Theater is like that, but for any video. It’s like watching YouTube on a 100-foot screen from the best seat in a cinema. I’ve been testing it, and it’s so great. I love it. And:

Sandwich is collaborating with the duo at SpatialGen, Michael Butterfield and Zachary Handshoe. See their expertise on display as they produce the first-ever stereoscopic livestream of The Talk Show Live.

The studio is also collaborating with SpatialGen to livestream John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live in stereoscopically-captured 3D video using high-end cameras and lenses. [...]

“I started to think ‘what if John’s audience that can’t be at the California Theater could join us anyway?’ That’s when I pitched the idea to my co-developer, the genius Andy Roth,” Adam [Lisagor] says. “He loved it, he found SpatialGen, and I pitched them the idea. And we had roughly 8 weeks to make this happen, and I can’t believe it all came together.”

Live-streaming an event and making it look good in realtime is hard enough. But doing it in 3D video? That’s new territory, especially considering Apple Vision Pro was just previewed at last year’s WWDC and launched in the United States in February.

“Gruber was fascinated by the idea but a little skeptical it could work — it just seemed too ambitious,” Lisagor adds. “The world’s first livestreamed 3D video event? In an immersive theater environment? Admittedly seems like a pipe dream. But nope, it’s real.”

To be clear, the exclusive way to watch the livestream will be through Theater on Vision Pro. Murphy’s Law willing, it should be pretty cool. We’re still shooting the event with traditional cameras, for a traditional version on YouTube, which will go up later this week.

★ Monday, 10 June 2024