Flashback to the Future

You made a big splash with your very first Apple Immersive Video, which begins with the President of France casually walking into the room and addressing the camera. What did it feel like that day to be watching that happen?

I discovered immersive video back in 2017. At first, it was simply a passion. I never imagined it could become anything more, especially a business. Quite simply because, aside from a handful of geeks, the market didn’t exist and honestly, it still barely exists today.

When I met Sixtine and showed her what I was doing, she told me, “This is so extraordinary, it has to succeed.” So we created Immersive Flashback together.

And then, just a few months later, there we were at the Élysée Palace, our own version of the White House, then filming Bastille Day with the President on the Champs-Élysées, standing right next to him the way immersive video naturally places you, with two Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive cameras that, up until then, had only really been seen on Apple productions.

What was the reaction like for the people who have seen it?

Most people still don’t know the Apple Immersive format. Some people who have already tried VR mistakenly assume it’s the same thing.

But the reaction when an Apple Immersive video starts is always the same: “Wow!” “OMG!”

Some members of the Élysée Palace staff who watched the film even instinctively stood up when the President walked into the office.

Your earlier narrative piece creates a parallel storyline of Jewish and Muslim neighbors who only see eye to eye when they’re about to get into a street fight. What did you learn while shooting that piece?

In recent years, community divisions have caused a great deal of damage around the world. And yet, people are often far more alike than they realize.

This film, which specifically challenges prejudice, was a real lesson for us because it proved how powerful immersive storytelling can be, not just for showing spectacular things, but for telling deeply human stories.

Immersive cinema immediately creates a very strong emotional connection with the characters and allows you to generate a rare level of emotion for a 12 minute short film. About one out of every two viewers ends up crying by the end of the film.

In your upcoming documentary about young dancers, you fill the entire field of view with tremendous energy. How did you figure out where to be? Was it like choreography?

In this film, immersive cinema captures a very unique emotion that exists inside Sabrina Lonis’ classes.

The children are between 7 and 13 years old, and they dance like seasoned professionals. They are passionate and give absolutely everything they have. You can feel the effort, the perseverance, and Sabrina’s extraordinary talent.

She is an incredibly gifted creative personality, but also someone who knows how to transmit discipline and high standards with kindness. What she achieves with these children is truly unique.

For the camera placement, I deliberately wanted viewers to experience the groups from the inside: their choreography, but also their exhaustion, their effort, and sometimes even their doubts.

Dance is an emotional outlet for these children, some of whom were confronted far too early with difficult realities in life. It gives them an incredible maturity that you can feel throughout the film.

Besides more and more affordable ways to watch, what do you think needs to happen for this medium to advance?

There are two major things.

The first is simply allowing more people to discover how incredible immersive video actually is. Right now, sharing it is not easy. You need an Apple Vision Pro, the eye setup process adds friction, and access remains limited. If people cannot experience immersive video for themselves, they cannot truly understand it, and the format remains largely unknown.

The second is significantly improving the devices themselves. They need to become lighter, less isolating, and above all, more affordable.

I have a hard time imagining mainstream audiences immediately embracing devices that are still this heavy and expensive. On the other hand, I can absolutely imagine lightweight glasses capable of displaying augmented reality content across a field of view large enough to support immersive video, including the possibility of fully darkening the lenses when needed.

Glasses capable of displaying AR content already exist today, although with a relatively limited field of view for now. 180 degrees is probably not coming tomorrow, but with around 70% of people already wearing glasses, the transition from traditional eyewear to connected glasses capable of displaying spatial computing feels very credible to me, even if it happens gradually.

In the meantime, devices like the Apple Vision Pro offer a compromise that gives people access to spatial computing today. But they will need to become lighter and more affordable if they want to achieve broader adoption.

Personally, I think there will eventually be a convergence between two approaches: on one side, lightweight connected glasses that will begin without displays, then progressively show images in small areas, later in stereoscopic 3D, and eventually across a full immersive field of view. On the other side, mixed reality headsets will continue becoming lighter, cheaper, and more powerful.

To preserve the lightweight nature of glasses, the computing power may ultimately come from a small external device, perhaps the size of a smartphone, carried in your pocket.

From our neck of the woods, it feels like some of the best AIV is coming out of France. Why do you think the Vision Pro and this new cinema has more traction in Paris than Hollywood?

The French mindset is very different from the American mindset.

Americans tend to be extremely business oriented, for better and for worse. Pragmatically, they see that the market does not really exist yet, and every week for the past two years they’ve been reading headlines claiming Apple is abandoning the Vision Pro. So they prefer to wait until the market shows stronger momentum before investing significant time and money into it.

The French approach is less business driven, sometimes unfortunately, sometimes fortunately. They see a wonderful new format, they fall in love with it, and they jump in. Whether it makes money today is almost secondary.

You only have to compare the kinds of 2D films financed in France versus those financed in the United States to understand the difference.

In Hollywood, there are massive budgets and a true film industry. In France, cinema is still perceived first and foremost as an art form. It benefits from significant public funding, which allows films that were never meant to become blockbusters to exist in the first place.