Apple is Adding Spatial Photo and Video Support to Safari

Oct 25, 2024

Jaron Schneider

A person wearing virtual reality glasses watches a video of an older man and a young woman playing guitars on a beach. The scene is labeled "Pescadero" with a date and time. A surfboard rests against a rock in the background.

Safari is becoming more spatial on Vision Pro. Starting later this year, web developers will be able to easily add spatial photos and videos to their websites.

Apple has been shifting its entire product strategy to support the capabilities of Vision Pro as it looks forward at what it believes to be the future of visual content. To that end, it has allowed the iPhone to capture spatial video since the iPhone 15 Pro and this year physically shifted the iPhone 16 camera array so that it too could capture spatial content. The iPhone 16 series came out of the gate with the ability to capture spatial photos and videos and a recent update to iOS has given the iPhone 15 Pro the ability to shoot spatial photos. And while the capture methods have been growing and the Vision Pro allows any photo — whether it was taken as spatial at the moment of capture or not — to be turned spatial, viewing this content is more limited.

A person photographs two people playing a guitar and ukulele on a beach. They sit on logs near the ocean, with a picnic basket and a purple blanket beside them. Another person lounges on the sand, reading a book.

Presently, spatial content can only be viewed by looking at the files directly, whether that content natively on the device or sent to it via iMessage, Airdrop, or other sharing methods, in a Vision Pro. However, Apple recognizes that in order for spatial content to become more popular and more widely used, it needs native support inside of a browser.

Apple plans to start expanding that this year. During a conversation with Della Huff, Product Manager at Apple, and Billy Sorrentino, who is on Apple’s Design Team, the two revealed to PetaPixel that Apple will support spatial photos and videos within the Safari web browser.

For example, PetaPixel‘s iPhone 16 Pro review is filled with photos captured with the new smartphone but if those photos were either captured as spatial content initially or turned into spatial photos using the tool inside of Vision Pro, that spatial content could be embedded in the review and, for those reading the review in Vision Pro, would appear to have depth and three dimensional qualities when viewed using Safari.

And, just as is the case with spatial photos now, the content is still fungible into two dimensional assets, Huff says, so for those who would see those photos outside of Vision Pro, the content would appear as it does now — flat. In this way, no viewer’s experience is hurt but Vision Pro users will see a big boost.

“Once you embedded spatial content, folks who are on Vision Pro are getting spatial and folks who are just looking at it on their laptop see it in two dimensions,” Sorrentino says.

“And at the same time, you can create all sorts of photos into spatial photos [in Vision Pro] including old historical photos. You could do this to all your old product reviews, you could to it to World War II photos, video game screenshots… I mean, what’s so cool about this technology is it gives us the ability to take things into that next dimension.”

The WebKit that will allow spatial content to be displayed in Safari to Vision Pro users will be arriving later this year.

Image credits: Apple