The Camera Soldier Is A New Kind Of Documentary On Apple Vision Pro

D-Day: The Camera Soldier is a spatial documentary out now exclusively on Apple Vision Pro.

Priced at $5 on the App Store, the experience blends 3D video, immersive video, and rendered scenes to tell the story of combat cameraman Richard Taylor, who captured some of the most iconic footage of D-Day during the initial invasion. It’s produced by TARGO, in collaboration with TIME Studios.

The 20-minute documentary is presented by the cameraman’s daughter, and has a heavy focus on her “emotional journey” in uncovering her father’s legacy.

Much of the documentary consists of 3D video of the daughter speaking about her father and her journey in verifying his tale of D-Day as she gets hold of the footage, as well as immersive video of her on Omaha Beach retracing his journey. I found this to be the weakest part of the film, but this might depend on your interests.

Where it shines is in its interactive time capsules and its VR recreations of moments.

These time capsules place you in darkness and present you with photorealistic 3D models of items like Taylor’s helmet, letters, and the camera he held, and you can pinch to grab, move, and rotate them. The rendered scenes, meanwhile, leverage a combination of human 3D modeling and AI colorization, upscaling, and segmentation to place you in a VR recreation of moments such as exiting the landing craft, and Taylor getting shot while lying prone on the beach recording footage.

The experience also presents many of the clips that he captured, of course, but in a rather strange way. You view it as if inside the housing of the camera, which is a great idea. But it’s fixed to your head, which feels unnecessary and strange to me.

D-Day: The Camera Soldier is $5 on the visionOS App Store, exclusively available on Apple Vision Pro.