What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks: “How are you enjoying your drive so far?” Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic. A minute later it does it again. “Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.” It blocks your speedometer with an overlay tutorial about the turn signal. It highlights the wiper controls and… read more

As more of you experiment with immersive and spatial video, one of the most common questions I get is: how can I encode my own stereoscopic video to MV-HEVC? Especially if you don’t want to rely entirely on Apple’s AVFoundation or if you don’t work as often with Mac hardware. In this post, I’ll walk through two approaches, one using the open source x265 encoder with multiview support, and another using NVIDIA’s sample encoder. While writing this post, Google announced updates to their Android XR SDK with Developer Preview 2: With the Jetpack XR SDK, you can now play back… read more

Have you ever wondered if what you see in “real life” truly represents the reality of our physical universe? We’ve grown so accustomed to certain aspects of our perception that any deviation would immediately signal that something is off. Think about the glitching cat in The Matrix or imagine if your life suddenly unfolded at 30 frames per second — as if lit by a strobe light on a dance floor. How do we know we’re not already inside the world’s most immersive video? In this post, I’ll share the tips, guidelines, and techniques I’ve gathered while working with filmmakers,… read more

If you’ve read my first post about Spatial Video, the second about Encoding Spatial Video, or if you’ve used my command-line tool, you may recall a mention of Apple’s mysterious “fisheye” projection format. Mysterious because they’ve documented a CMProjectionType.fisheye enumeration with no elaboration, they stream their immersive Apple TV+ videos in this format, yet they’ve provided no method to produce or playback third-party content using this projection type. Additionally, the format is undocumented, they haven’t responded to an open question on the Apple Discussion Forums asking for more detail, and they didn’t cover it in their WWDC23 sessions. As someone who has experience in this area –… read more

As I mentioned in my prior post about Spatial Video, the launch of the Apple Vision Pro has reignited interest in spatial and immersive video formats, and it’s exciting to hear from users who are experiencing this format for the first time. The release of my spatial video command-line tool and example spatial video player has inadvertently pulled me into a lot of fun discussions, and I’ve really enjoyed chatting with studios, content producers, camera manufacturers, streaming providers, enthusiasts, software developers, and even casual users. Many have shared test footage, and I’ve been impressed by a lot of what I’ve… read more

One month ago, Apple released the Vision Pro, and with it, the ability to record and playback spatial (and immersive) video. The Apple TV app includes a set of beautifully produced videos giving viewers the chance to sit in the studio with Alicia Keys, visit the world’s largest rhino sanctuary, and perhaps most stunningly, follow Faith Dickey as she traverses a “highline” 3,000 feet above Norway’s fjords. These are videos that envelop the viewer with ~180 degrees of wraparound content and provide a very strong sense of presence. It isn’t too hyperbolic to say that immersive video — when done… read more

Over the past year, I’ve found myself in an unexpected and relentless battle, not in the digital arenas of Call of Duty, but against an unseen, unyielding opponent: a false permanent ban. This isn’t just my story; it’s a glimpse into a widespread issue that has quietly affected thousands of players. It started with a simple misstep by an anti-cheat system and spiraled into a complex ordeal that questions the balance between vigilance against cheating and the rights of innocent gamers. In the following account, I’ll take you through the twists and turns of my efforts to seek justice, the… read more

Activision’s blind faith in the infallibility of their RICOCHET anti-cheat software, combined with a buggy and unstable Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II release, has resulted in faulty, permanent, and unappealable player account bans that prevent users from starting even the single-player game. These bans leave wrongly accused users who paid $70+ (USD) with no explanation, recourse, or ability to communicate with Activision about their issue. The message is: you’ve been banned for doing something, we can’t tell you what you did, please don’t do it again (or we might ban you from our other games), and oh, thanks for… read more

This past April, 2021, Comcast/Xfinity Seattle increased the speed of its top-tier internet service from 1Gbps to 1.2Gbps. With the 20% over-provisioning that is common to Xfinity, this means that you can now expect download speeds of up to 1.44Gbps with their top-tier plan. That is, if you have the correct network devices and configuration in place. Because we also use Xfinity’s voice service, I upgraded from a Netgear Nighthawk CM1150V to a new Netgear Nighthawk CM2050V. While the old CM1150V has DOCSIS 3.1 support (which is required for 1Gbps+ cable connections), its RJ45 network ports are limited to 1Gbps.… read more

I’ve updated all three of my plug-ins to support Adobe Illustrator 2021 (25.x). It’s hard to believe that Ai->XAML was released almost 16 years ago in July, 2005! Ai->Canvas was released almost 11 years ago in October, 2010. And my youngest, Duplicate, is coming up on 4 years this July. Amazing. Over the years, I’ve received occasional requests about scripting my export plug-ins, but because I don’t do any Illustrator scripting myself, I never took the time to figure out how to automate them. Recently, though, a user contacted me about converting 1,400 SVG files to XAML, and this provided… read more