Live AIV, from camera to Apple Vision Pro.

What live AIV is

AIV stands for Apple Immersive Video, Apple's 180-degree stereoscopic format for Apple Vision Pro. Most AIV to date has been produced like film: shot, graded, encoded, and published weeks later. Live AIV removes the gap. The viewer puts on a headset and is in the venue while the event is still going.

That shift changes every stage of the workflow. Nothing can be fixed in post, the encoder cannot fall behind, and the lens metadata that normally travels in a finished file has to travel with the stream instead.

The five stages of a live AIV stream

1. Capture

Apple Immersive Video depends on per-lens calibration, so it starts with a camera built for the format. The Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive is the current standard. It records both eyes at 90 frames per second, and its calibration data is what lets Apple Vision Pro project the image correctly.

2. Transport

The camera feed leaves as ProRes over SMPTE ST 2110. At 16K and 90 FPS this is a very large signal, which is why the encoder sits in the venue, on the same network as the camera, and not in a distant cloud region.

3. Encode

The stereo feed is compressed as MV-HEVC across several bitrates in real time. This is the hardest stage, and it has its own page:live Apple Immersive Video encoding. The short version is that a 16K, 90 FPS feed is about 10.5 billion pixels per second, and none of them can be late.

4. Package and deliver

The encoded video is segmented as HLS with the Apple Spatial Audio track and the venue description (AIME) file referenced from the playlist, then pushed to an origin or CDN. From there it scales like any other HLS stream.

5. Play

Apple Vision Pro plays Apple Immersive Video over HLS. The player reads the projection signaling and the venue description, picks a rung from the bitrate ladder based on the viewer's connection, and switches between rungs as conditions change.

Where Zeus fits

SpatialGen Zeus covers stages two through four in a single 3U rackmount system. It ingests ProRes 2110 at up to 16K and 90 FPS with 100 Gb/s of peak sustained throughput, encodes MV-HEVC live, packages the stream, and delivers it to SpatialGen, AWS, GCP, Azure, Akamai, or another provider. It supports the full Blackmagic URSA Cine line, including the URSA Cine Immersive 100G.

SpatialGen has been streaming immersive video live since The Talk Show Live at WWDC 2024, and built the pipeline behindSpectrum Front Row, the first Apple Immersive NBA experience.

What makes live AIV different from live VR180

Both are 180-degree stereo video, but AIV is stricter. It runs at 90 frames per second, carries calibration for the specific lenses that shot it, uses HDR in P3-D65 PQ, and is delivered as MV-HEVC with Apple Spatial Audio. A generic VR180 stream can be a side-by-side frame in a flat codec. A live AIV stream has to arrive with all of its metadata intact, or the headset will not treat it as Apple Immersive Video.

Planning a live AIV production

The questions that decide a live AIV project are practical ones: how many camera positions, what the venue network can carry, where the stream is going, and who is on call when something changes an hour before the event. Every Zeus comes with a year of direct access to SpatialGen engineers, the same team that has run these productions, and the encoder itself is a one-time purchase with a lifetime license. See theZeus technical specifications for the full system details.