NOOIT GEDACHT BIRDS
Last September I bought the iPhone 15 pro max for its camera. I am going to start updating every year through a T-Mobile plan because the camera improves so much year by year. The three huge improvements this year were for me the 5x optical zoom, allowing me to take photos of people from a distance without disturbing them; the portrait mode that lets me set the focus in processing mode after taking the photo, which allows me to blur unwanted backgrounds, and the 24 MB resolution which allows me to crop pretty radically allowing me to aim the camera from my hip at wide angle and still be able to hit and then crop what I am want to photograph without disturbing anyone or even appearing to have taken a photograph. I am using all of these new improvements in the photographs that I am putting on daily. So whenever you look at my photographs you will see some combination of blurred background, distance shots and people in cropped shots who seem to be close but in the original photograph appeared to be very small and far away.
But there is one new feature that I didn’t know about when I bought the 15 Max. And that is that it will take spatial videos with spatial video sound. So if you look occasionally at my posts you will have noticed several videos which I call spatial videos. Spatial video and spatial sound are new ways of making and seeing wraparound video which is stunning in but which you can only see with full effect if you have an Apple Vision Pro set of goggles, which you don’t have because they have just been released and because they are very expensive, $3500.
I am trying, but failing, to include here a link to a rhapsodic Vogue interview of Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, which describes how miraculous and technically advanced this new augmented reality headset is and why it is so expensive.
Vogue, Why Tim Cook Is Going All In On The Apple Vision Pro
So neither you nor I can get the full effect of the wrap around video in amazing clarity until we get access to the Vision Pro. But just before I left I bought little white Apple EarPods which promised that I would be able to hear spatial sound. And they work I discovered today.
So today’s video is a walk around the garden of Nooit Gedacht so that I will be able to remember what it feels like to be here. I did it primarily to record the strange whooping and hooting and chirping of the many invisible birds in the garden and the sound of walkways being swept by stiff brooms that are a sound you hear everywhere in Sri Lanka. And I can tell you that the sounds of the birds pick up very well and are very clear over my spatial EarPods. Unfortunately even the sounds of my footsteps are recorded. Next time I will have to go barefoot. So if you have spatial EarPods you will be able to hear the birds all around you. (Bose is offering to let you trade in your Bose QC earphones for the new Spatial Audio model for $150, a sign that this new era is beginning).
I am just learning to use video, trying to remember to move slowly. But my goal over the next month is to record spatial video of as much of India as I can so that I can bring it home with me and share it with others. So I am warning you here that this is my intention so that you will understand what I am doing.
But I am guessing that Nick Bolton in his Vogue article on the Apple Vision Pro is right about a number of things. He admits that there will be a huge number of naysayers, people who refuse even to try this new technology or argue that is fails because it is too solitary, too heavy, won’t do everything, is only for nerds and will never catch on and most of all that it is too expensive. But he says that the Vision Pro is as miraculous and amazing as the too expensive iPhone originally was, but that it is so immersive and seductive that we won’t be able to resist it. He says that after being immersed in the world of the Vision Pro we will become addicted for better or for worse, as addicted as we are to our iPhones, because after experiencing the immersion of the Vision Pro everything else, our iPhones, our MacBooks, our flat screen OLED televisions will seem just that, flat. We are so used to living in flatland on all our screens that they seem real. But after the Vision Pro, they will seem vaguely artificial and empty and we will yearn for the real thing, as 3D and immersive as the world that we all live in, the 3D world of everyday life.
We’ll see. I know you don’t believe me or him. But on this trip I am going to try to enter that world even though I haven’t been able to experience it yet.
Here is today’s spatial video and then a few more photographs of Nooit Gedacht.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0dfFMZ95TgX84orvYKK-s8mvg
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BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 