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At SXSW this year, one recurring theme for those of us on the ground was VR180, not because new hardware was pervasive, or because everyone was “talking about it”, but because if you looked closely you could connect the dots. Our friends at Blackmagic Design came to the show with a focused intent – to give filmmakers the hands-on look at the new URSA Cine Immersive Video rig that they’ve been craving.
The new camera in the cine line priced at $29,995 is a professional VR180 cinema rig dripping with features including two 8K lenses, and perhaps the most important feature, its seamless production pipeline garnering it the coveted Apple Vision Pro partner status for filmmakers. The sum total of immersive video content on Apple Vision Pro is still falling short of demand, but that could be changing within a few short months as filmmakers gain access to the camera and simplified workflows. Already in presales since December 2024, the camera will still not start shipping until later this year, and the next public viewing and availability will coincide with the upcoming NAB show in the first week of April in Las Vegas. We got a first-hand look at SXSW (video below).
First Look at Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive at SXSW 2025. Video: Alexander Wilcox, Monique Taylor
Over the last couple of years we have had a few milestone events on immersive content, notably the launch of Apple Vision Pro, which we all know upped the resolution and fidelity of its graphics to staggering resolution. This beauty hit filmmakers and app developers with the same punch, the lower fidelity imagery didn’t look that great once viewed on an equivalent of an IMAX in an HMD. The mad dash to optimize content for AVP overwhelmed many devs in the lead-up to its launch last year. It also gave pioneering entrepreneurs like Matt Miesnieks the inspiration for his new company, Dejavu, which produces fully optimized generative scenes for AVP using AI.
The reality is the same with all media, build for the best, highest fidelity use-case, and everything else can be down-rezed to palpable quality for lower-power, lower-bandwidth systems, your 4k video becomes 2k or HD, or standard def. Going the other direction is a lot harder, even with up-rezing and AI doing a lot of the heavy lifting, it still is much better to have that greater capacity to get beautiful LOG footage with as powerful a sensor at the time of capture.
And in the VR180 world of experimentation and content creation, if in the last year we didn’t have access to Apple’s proprietary Immersive Video setup that helped capture groundbreaking cinematic experiences like the Alicia Keys studio session, or the most recent premiere of Metallica’s Mexico City concert which makes grown men cry, then we were creating it with the next best thing – a Canon VR180 2.8 Dual Fisheye lens and pushing it to its absolute limits.
Now this workflow is not for beginners, it’s a cumbersome workflow and although Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve can handle it, tutorials and testimonials to the headaches and heartaches to get content onto the platform have been circulating amongst our inner circle and beyond. We are helping each other out as much as we can, but it still leaves a lot to be desired for indie filmmakers who don’t have the access or the pocketbooks for a professional rig, or for whom deep code is far from their love language.
So while many of us were at SXSW sampling the delicious slow-cooked XR meals on the XR Experiences floor, grazing through content that showed us the way VR180 could be seamlessly integrated, filmmakers have been anticipating the coming URSA Cine camera and its impact on Apple’s long game for immersive content and are getting to work.
Polyphonic Spree’s VR180 Dome with antigravity lounge chairs delivered the ultimate immersive viewing experience sans HMD.
Anthony Maes, Founder of Accute Immersive and the free and open source OpenImmersive Video Player for AVP (don’t miss the GitHub), is among XR pioneers who believe that this is truly the long game representing the most exciting opportunity of XR of the next decade, and not necessarily for AVP, but for AIP – Apple Immersive Video. The Next 10 Years of Immersive Entertainment.
“What’s staggering about the Blackmagic Cine Immersive camera is how future-proof it is. It might take a decade until headsets can fully do justice to the 113 megapixels that it captures in RAW. But it’s not going to be easy or cheap for early adopter creators,” says Maes.
Maes has been ahead of the curve for quite some time now having been an early AR developer at Layar, Dekko, and Niantic to name a few of his accolades.
So while the new Blackmagic Design URSA Cine camera does not solve the pocketbook problem, coming in at a very clearly – this is for professionals only – price, it helps us imagine a future where immersive video content whether produced in Accute or Davinci Resolve provides us with smooth workflow to produce, polish, and publish from Blackmagic through to OpenImmersive, Vimeo or future applications with more ease than ever before.
Dave Hoffman, Business Development Manager, Americas, explained that they looked at the problem and decided to solve three basic issues to make it “as easy as possible for creators to get creative with creative tools” using 1) cost management in manufacturing, 2) performance – optimizing for the AVP at 8k x 8k to get a full map of the AVP headset resolution 3) out of the box production without requiring a bespoke solution, reducing the manual production with which creators are currently contending. Their view is acquisition, management, distribution, and consumption need to all flow freely, and with Apple’s help, hopefully they will have achieved that.
The full interview with Dave is embedded above. Our first look – as well as the promise of 16 stops of dynamic range – got us really excited…but we are hopeful that its launch opens up a truly great new wave of content for AVP and beyond. And much like those 8k pixels per eye, think of the ways that across platforms and touchpoints from 8k on down, that immersive content will be boxed and ready for takeout on whatever comes next.
AR Insider’s Editor-at-Large Emily Olman is an XR community builder, roving journalist, and CEO & Chief Media Officer of Hopscotch Interactive.
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