Apple’s Mysterious Fisheye Projection
Mike Swanson:
If you’ve read my first post about Spatial Video, the
second about Encoding Spatial Video, or if you’ve used my
command-line tool, you may recall a mention of Apple’s
mysterious “fisheye” projection format. Mysterious because they’ve
documented a CMProjectionType.fisheye enumeration with no
elaboration, they stream their immersive Apple TV+ videos in this
format, yet they’ve provided no method to produce or playback
third-party content using this projection type.
Additionally, the format is undocumented, they haven’t responded
to an open question on the Apple Discussion Forums asking
for more detail, and they didn’t cover it in their WWDC23
sessions. As someone who has experience in this area — and a
relentless curiosity — I’ve spent time digging-in to Apple’s
fisheye projection format, and this post shares what I’ve learned.
Fascinating deep dive.
★
Mike Swanson:
If you’ve read my first post about Spatial Video, the
second about Encoding Spatial Video, or if you’ve used my
command-line tool, you may recall a mention of Apple’s
mysterious “fisheye” projection format. Mysterious because they’ve
documented a CMProjectionType.fisheye enumeration with no
elaboration, they stream their immersive Apple TV+ videos in this
format, yet they’ve provided no method to produce or playback
third-party content using this projection type.
Additionally, the format is undocumented, they haven’t responded
to an open question on the Apple Discussion Forums asking
for more detail, and they didn’t cover it in their WWDC23
sessions. As someone who has experience in this area — and a
relentless curiosity — I’ve spent time digging-in to Apple’s
fisheye projection format, and this post shares what I’ve learned.
Fascinating deep dive.