Recording Studio for Theater
Sandwich Vision's immersive experience Apple Vision Pro video app
I was tasked with creating a near-identical digital replica of a studio in California where the Sandwich Vision team produced and recorded Grammy-winning Mexican singer-songwriter Lila Downs for a 31-minute immersive spatial-audio and stereoscopic video-musical experience that features seven of her songs.
The performance was recorded, and subsequently, we re-constructed the studio digitally, to create the immersive scene for projecting the stereoscopic video of her performance, and incorporating Spatial Audio. This captivating experience is exclusively available through the Theater app and is compatible only with the Apple Vision Pro.
Since I am based in Mexico City and the studio is in California, I had only a couple videos, images and basic measurements of the studio to work with. To start creating the replica, I needed a good foundation... so I decided to use the materials provided to train a nerf and create a gaussian splat model, which I could use to block out one half of the studio. That really accelerated the process, and eliminated the guesswork of correctly getting the room objects to real-world scale.
Final room, with baked lights and textures
The final version was imported and optimized for Reality Composer Pro, Apple's proprietary software for developing experiences for their Vision OS. This was my first full project for the platform so I had to quickly get up to speed using their shader graph and nodes, to bring in all the content.
Shader graph nodes for the baked lighting on walls and floor
Most objects were created from scratch. Purchased instruments were optimized using Houdini, and the most fun object to re-create for this environment were some lamps used in the studio control room, which I sculpted in VR using Substance Modeler.
Here we can see the comparison of the real space photo vs the final optimized environment, using a USD workflow.
Thank you for watching!