I’m facinated by views of people looking at art. They’re even better in 3D. The hard part is always being rushed. One day I need to go to a museum by myself and spend time waiting for better shots. I’d love to make a whole zine (printed and for the Vision Pro) of these one day.
These images are all from the Amy Sherald show we saw at SF MOMA back in January.
Last month we went to Rome and Florence. It was spectacular. I took so many photos—here are a handful.
It took 5 months to get here but I finally got my Dwarf 3 telescope and had a chance to take some images. Now the images right from the telescope don’t look this good but you can download the .fits files and process them yourself. So I figured I try to learn how to do that. I used this tutorial as a starting point (I skipped re-stacking the images myself) and got some nice results. These are taken from my backyard in light-polluted Dallas, TX.
I think this is the best solution at the moment. I’ve added a button (labeled “spatial”) over these that triggers fullscreen. If you’re using an Apple Vision Pro, putting these in fullscreen will allow you to see the 3D versions. Everyone else will get 2D versions.
<div class="media-container alignwide">
<div class="video-container">
<video controls playsinline="true" poster="https://exp.michaelverdi.com/styles/spatial-poster.jpg">
<source src="https://exp.michaelverdi.com/styles/spatial.mov">
<source src="https://exp.michaelverdi.com/styles/spatial.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>
<button class="fullscreen-button" onclick="goFullscreen(this)"><img src="https://blog.michaelverdi.com/media/apple-vision-pro-icon.svg"/></button>
</div>
</div>
<div class="media-container alignwide">
<picture>
<source srcset="https://exp.michaelverdi.com/styles/spatial.heic" type="image/heic">
<img class="photo" src="https://exp.michaelverdi.com/styles/spatial.jpg" alt="your alt text">
<button class="fullscreen-button" onclick="goFullscreen(this)"><img src="https://blog.michaelverdi.com/media/apple-vision-pro-icon.svg"/></button>
</picture>
</div>
<script>
function goFullscreen(button) {
const media=button.previousElementSibling;
if (media.requestFullscreen) {
media.requestFullscreen();
}
}
</script>I love having (what I think is) a cool website. I also want a blog. You can do that with WordPress but it’s a lot of work. It also seems that problems are likely to crop up at some point. They certainly did for me. I am absolutely not interested in trying to fix that stuff. So now I’ve got this new installation of WordPress on it’s on domain. I’m using the default theme with a tiny bit of additional CSS. Hopefully this will be easier to maintain.
I spent a little time over the weekend trying to bring The Phantom Moon to life. I created this in Blender, rendered out a still image, and then made a video out of it. This was recorded in my Apple Vision Pro.
In VisionOS 2.2 (I’m on the developer beta), you can now “tap to view spatial photos and videos embedded on web pages” in Safari.
So if you’re viewing this in Safari in VisionOS 2.2 you can select and hold the image which brings up a menu where you can select “View Spatial Photo.” To view the spatial video, tap it to start it playing and then tap the fullscreen button in the upper-left corner.
The image and video are from a trip to The Morton Arboretum outside of Chicago.
A couple of weeks ago Anthony Maës released an open source immersive video player based on Mike Swanson’s work. It’s also published as an app that you can download on the Vision Pro. It’s now my go-to app for playing immersive MV-HEVC videos. I was hopeful I could use this to make an app for my work.
For my purposes, I want an app that you can download and then just hit play to watch the thing I’ve made. Today that would be as close as I can get to the experience of watching Apple’s immersive videos in the TV app. So this weekend I set out to see if I could modify this player with a custom menu that only plays a video that I include with the app. Spoiler alert: I did it! Here’s roughly how:
