Apple Vision Pro's spatial photography gives you a whole new perspective on the scenes and people you photograph. Like a statue, you can position the image in your field of view.

You can create exclusive spatial photos and videos using the Apple Vision Pro itself or with your iPhone camera. This is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max and allows you to capture a 3D scene and save it to the Vision Pro Photos app.

Indie developer J Paris Morgan has also released a new app for the Apple Silicon Mac that can convert existing photos into the type of 3D work that can be displayed in Vision Pro.

The Spatial Media Converter app can convert any .png or .jpg image, including old photos and AI-generated images, into a fully realized Spatial Photo. [This is because there is a bug in Apple's image processing and if the image is smaller than this size, the conversion will be rejected.

Starting with the conversion from an RGB image to a depth map, the depth map is projected onto a 3D mesh, creating an RGB-to-depth image. Next, this is converted to a stereo image by calculating the parallax between the left and right eyes when viewing the image

. [Finally, the stereo image is converted to a HEIC file that is compatible with Apple Vision Pro," Paris explains. All of this work is done on the device using Apple Silicon's AI processing capabilities.

From the demo videos and examples shared by users of the app (on Discord), it does an impressive job of converting 2D images into 3D works.

I myself have created several Spatial Photos using the app, but cannot view them without Vision Pro. However, the previews show good color retention and the details accurately reflect the originals.

The format has spread beyond Vision Pro, and since the Meta Quest headset also supports Spatial Photos, a variety of uses are possible; as Paris explains, "Converting RGB images to Spatial Photos can be used in a variety of useful for computer vision and 3D modeling applications."

As spatial computing grows in popularity, more users will be looking for ways to convert existing images to the new format, and such tools will continue to proliferate.