Simple answer: it’s not. It’s just plain old stereoscopic video. Same technique as for hundreds of years. There’s no 6dof, there’s barely any depth because the lenses are too close. They’re looking to fix that (hopefully) with the iPhone 16. But even still, this is just vr180.

There’s incredible hype around this for no reason.

Mic Ty, this article needs a full revision. Spatial video is 3D stereoscopic video, Apple is just labelling the video process differently than what is it. Too many terms with same definitions can create confusion for novice. Lets be fair here.

The 3D videos made on iPhone can be played back on Quest 3. Meta released an update the day Vision Pro was released.

I have one and have 17.2 but I can’t view the spatial video, except as standard 3d videos: https://360rumors.com/spatial-video-quest/

Luckily this time, the MV-HEVC standard has nothing to do with Apple closed “garden” ecosystem. Luckily this time, Apple decided to use an official international standard established in 2014. MV-HEVC stands for Multi View High Efficiency Video Coding. It was developed by a working group of ISO/IEC MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) and ITU-T VCEG (Video Coding Experts Group).
LIDAR data can be stored in that format as one of the views and be adequately used by LIDAR-aware playback software.

… looks like the interface for posting comments on this page doesn’t like a “star” character … my earlier comment about XY resolution of LIDAR component must be re-written to 140×170 pixels.

The GIF animation in this article has nothing to do with the advertised “spatial video”. This animation was produced from two video frames recorded when a single lens camera was rolling on a dolly around guitar players (i.e. those are two different frames captured in two consecutive but separate time moments … hands of the players and lady’s hair are in different positions in those two frames) … that “look-around” effect was produced in the very old/classic way known for ages (no LIDAR needed to do that).
When it comes to LIDAR depth sensor used in iPhone15 phone, apparently it’s IMX611 (made by Sony) with XY resolution at just 140170 pixels. Surprisingly Sony doesn’t provide Z (depth) resolution of that sensor. An interesting discussion about that LIDAR is in the comments of the following article:
https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-iphone-15-pro-spatial-video-capture-3d-vision-pro/

Hi Jarno. This is not just going to be 3D. The perspective will change as you move, which is not possible on normal 3D or VR180.