#spatial_overview
Apple Vision Pro Made It Onto a Star Wars Set
Great little story just surfaced. Jon Favreau — director of The Mandalorian & Grogu (hitting theaters May 22) —
https://www.roadtovr.com/star-wars-jon-favreau-apple-vision-pro/The problem is intuitive once you hear it: you're making a movie for a massive IMAX screen, but on set you're looking at a regular monitor. "No matter how big your TV is, it's not an IMAX screen," Favreau said. A composition that looks great in the studio can land completely differently when the audience is sitting in front of a wall-sized screen.
The fix is elegant. Disney built custom software for Vision Pro that drops Favreau into a virtual IMAX theater right there on set. He puts on the headset — and watches his take exactly the way audiences will see it in a cinema.
Full scope, correct aspect ratio, right viewing distance.
What makes the story especially good is Favreau's framing of the logic:
"That's a piece of technology that existed without us. We did a little bit of a software build on top of it. But we're leveraging consumer-facing tech in an industrial capacity."
A $3,499 headset sold to anyone with a credit card turned out to be cheaper and faster than commissioning bespoke gear for a single use case.
And it actually saves money. The most expensive shots in film are the ones that don't make it. Reshoots, cutting-room-floor footage, "wait, that framing is off." Vision Pro lets the director see the final shot through the audience's eyes before the actors have even left their trailers.
There's a broader pattern here for AR/VR. While the industry has spent years debating how to sell headsets to mass consumers, the real applications keep showing up on their own — on Hollywood sets, in operating rooms, in defense contracts. Not where anyone was looking for them.
So when you catch The Mandalorian in IMAX this May — keep in mind the director already saw some of those shots through a headset months before you did.