Wist Delivers Minority Report’s Memory Replay On Apple Vision Pro & Quest

Wist lets you capture events with an iPhone and revisit them as stabilized volumetric memories on Apple Vision Pro or Quest.

Functionally, a “memory” captured with Wist looks a lot like the replay feature Tom Cruise’s character used in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report.

“Years ago I felt how magical spatial media could be,’ Wist CEO Andrew R McHugh wrote to UploadVR in response to questions. “I started Wist to give everyone else that same magical experience. Especially as a dad, I can’t describe how meaningful it is to me to be able to relive my son’s first breaths, first laugh, first steps, and all the tiny moments in between.”

Here’s a screen recording from Apple Vision Pro showing the Wist “memory” manually aligned closely with its physical future, and viewed from head on:

The steeper the viewing angle, the more Wist’s ability to resolve geometry or textures degrades.

Here’s what viewing a memory heavily offset from its original capture angle looks like. I’m basically in the same spot I captured from using an iPhone 16 Pro and I’ve just chosen to display it at an angle so you can see how the detail drops away.

Wist notes on its website “the app captures depth, device pose, and more when you record. Your captures get synced across your devices, immediately available to view. Wist’s backend automatically generates an ‘enhanced’ version, refining the raw, noisy, low-resolution sensor data from your capture (a spatial equivalent to standard/high def).”

The platform is currently in private beta with support for iPhone Pro devices from the 13 generation forward for capture. For viewing, the startup supports Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest headsets.

You can also view in mobile AR on the iPhone, but that doesn’t provide the sense of depth of a headset.

Wist provides a really slick proof of concept of what might ultimately be the ideal capture and viewing format for memories, and it should get better over time. The California-based startup, led by CEO Andrew R McHugh and co-founder and CTO Michael Oder, says it saves the raw captures, meaning memories “can be continually enhanced with every update to our reconstruction and enhancement pipeline”.

Overall, I’m impressed enough by the capture quality in Wist to seriously consider capturing with the app in the future so that I can revisit some moments in headsets. This is the volumetric media we were promised a generation ago and, even with some awkwardness to captures at present, it’s a more impactful viewing experience already making eye contact with each of my cats in a memory replay than it is to view them in a photo or video, even a spatial one.

“We do not retain capture data after a user deletes it,” McHugh wrote. “We do expect users will benefit from their own data as they capture with us. We expect that we’ll fill in missing parts of a user’s capture with data from other captures from that same user (e.g. I captured one side of my living room yesterday and today I capture the other side. Both captures could be made better with data from the other).”

I recommend giving Wist’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service a read if or when you sign up. Wist retains a lot of data to produce these memory replays, and so I reached out to Wist to ask about a couple lines I noticed in those terms that made me wonder about the use of data. Replying over email, McHugh indicated the terms governing the use of Wist are likely to change by the time they launch broadly. So be sure to give them a close read if you give the app a try.