SPACIAL PHOTOGRAPHS (2)
When the new operating system for the Vision Pro was released this week I had no idea what was coming, but didn’t expect much. I looked at a You Tube video by a developer who described what was going on in technical language that I couldn’t understand. He was excited about the super size of the new virtual screen, as big as two huge 55 inch flat screens set side by side that wrapped around him, and by the way his MacBook Pro and the Vision Pro were integrated which made it much easier for him to edit videos. But he wasn’t impressed by much else.
But then I discovered that the Vision Pro, which could already make very good spatial photographs and movies, could do something else, something that to me seemed be pure magic. It could take an ordinary digital photograph and turn it into a spatial photograph. I looked at another You Tube response to the new software by a guy who was inclined to mock the new release and prepared not to be even mildly interested in anything new. He ticked through the new large flat screen and various other new elements, unimpressed, until he tried out the new ability to turn flat older digital photographs into spatial videos. He was first somewhat impressed and then, when he turned old photographs of a dog he had loved into spatial videos, he suddenly found his old friend fully present again in 3D form and he felt tears coming down his cheeks. It was as if he had brought the dog back to life.
And when I tried this, easily transforming photographs of my grandchildren when they were little, the same thing happened to me. There are two things about this that I can’t understand. The subject of the photographs hasn’t changed, in fact the spatial transformation doesn’t seem to have changed things that much. But the change in emotional effect is enormous. Something in my brain responds with intense feeling. The slight shift to 3D, brings an enormous shift in emotional response. And then when I looked at photographs of Kathe, my wife, who died 3 1/2 years ago, she was suddenly right here in front of me and I could hear her voice and her laugh. The effect is enormous. I don’t know how this happens, but it does.
The second thing that I, of course, don’t understand is how the Vision Pro changes a photograph from a flat photograph to a 3D spatial photograph. The photographs I have from long ago did not have any depth information in them. The cameras weren’t that highly developed. I can see how portrait mode photographs in which you can reset the focus after taking the photgraph could be turned into 3D spatial photographs. But how could a flat photograph be transformed into a spatial photograph, and not the kind of stiff 3D photographs of the 3D readers we looked at as kids with flat cardboard objects at different distance, these photographs have fully rounded faces and are entirely realistic. It is that molded look which gives them their great emotional presence. What must be happening is that artificial intelligence must have a way of creating completely rounded realistic faces from a flat photograph. I have no idea how this happens. But it is magic.
As this slowly dawned on me I began to realize that all of the 100’s of thousands of digital photographs that I have taken in the last 25 years could now, whenever I want to, be transferred into fully realistic spatial photographs making the subject completely alive in my presence.
And then I realized, again, that until Apple or someone else figures how to show in depth spatial videos on a flat screen, that showing these spatial photographs to anyone, sitting side by side with someone and marveling together about how life like they are, will be very difficult to do.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 