Experience iPhone 15 Pro's 3D videos on the Quest 3: exploring the Vision Pro’s exciting features early!

Hey there, VR fans and iPhone buffs! Apple's iPhone 15 Pro just upped the cool factor with something called Spatial Video. But guess what? You don't need to wait for the Apple Vision Pro to get released in order to get a taste of the promised 3D action. Turns out, your trusty Meta Quest 3 can let you in on the fun too.

The iPhone 15 Pro was introduced at Wonderlust on the 12th of September, and users rocking Apple’s newest phone running the latest iOS Beta can now capture life's moments in three dimensions thanks to this new Spatial Video format.

Where’s the catch? Well, you need a Vision Pro headset in order to view the things in 3D, as intended!

But what exactly is Spatial Video? In a nutshell, it's stereoscopic 3D (distinct images for each eye seamlessly merged by our brains to form a unified 3D image). With the recent iOS 17.2 Beta 2 release, Apple revealed that these spatial recordings are FullHD stereoscopic videos, captured at 30 FPS for each eye.


These 3D videos are then meant to float in your Vision Pro headset. But here’s the twist — you don’t actually need one to see what it’s like!

Here’s where it gets interesting. You don't have to wait for the Vision Pro to get released. A clever developer's app, Spatialify (still in Beta, so you’ll need to grab it via TestFlight, which is Apple’s platform for app testing), lets you transform Apple's spatial videos to play nice with the best VR headsets like the Meta Quest.

It's a bit of a roundabout but stick with me for the steps:

1. First, convert the videos using Spatialify on your iPhone
2. Then, transfer these files to a Mac or PC
3. Finally, move them to your Quest
4. For Meta Quest users, Sidequest is your best friend for this transfer
5. Remember to hit that SBS (Side-By-Side) format for playback

So, what's the deal with these 3D videos you can create with your iPhone 15 Pro? Apple says it captures life's moments instead of flat images.

But it doesn’t seem to be the full-blown, move-around-the-scene type of 3D that the Vision Pro trailers promise, even if Apple states it's pretty darn close. Well, we'll just have to try it out and see when the Vision Pro is out, right?

The iPhone 15 Pro's introduction of Spatial Video is a bold step towards bringing 3D video capabilities to a mainstream audience, even if it’s not the first to record 3D video sans special accessories. If Apple keeps this up with future iPhones, we could all be shooting 3D videos like pros before we know it.