Many journalists and developers who have tried it report profound excitement around Apple's first headset device. Rather than pushing the term "VR," or even "AR," (much less "AI"), they present it as their first "spatial" computer.

Being so Apple-ishly careful about their choice of terms, they've been promoting this word, "spatial," for a while. By "spatial audio," Apple refers to the illusion of fixed-position sound sources placed around the listener. Some of their headphones accomplish this by tracking and compensating for the movement of the head. I love this on walks: the "speakers" sound like they're in front, then when taking a left on the trail, they remain "fixed" at my right until the software decides to gently reposition them in front of me. And, though it sounds like a bit of a stretch, Apple says some of their computer's speakers support "spatial audio" by attempting to replicate what would happen if their sound were produced from those surrounding locations.

In any case, "spatial" strikes me as a refreshingly optimal generic descriptor. It just means "relating to or occupying space," and even merely "relating to space" would have been sufficient to characterize both spatial audio and the allegedly-impressive locking of windows, menus and app content to the real world with the Vision Pro. You can move about the room, inspect them from whichever angle, peek around them like real objects and surfaces, and so on.

This week, developers and journalists were invited to capture and view (and write about) "spatial video." During the initial reveal of this feature, I gathered with delight that this "spatial" format might enable the same: playback of video that you could tilt your body and almost seem to look "around," similar to "light field camera" techniques I most associate with Lytro.

But it sounds like it's just stereoscopic video: a left and right video channel which play back in 3D. John Gruber:

The HEVC spec allows for a single file to contain multiple video streams. That’s what Apple is doing, with metadata describing which stream is “left” and which is “right”.

I've always loved stereoscopic 3D everything, and this initially 1080p, 30fps format sounds like some of the loveliest 3D video to date, but to use "spatial" for this fundamentally age-old principle, producing video which is not inspectable by virtue of its relation to actual space, seems beyond a stretch.