Apple Immersive Video has quietly become the premium format for spatial content. As of this release, the ZeusXR Player streams it natively — MV-HEVC frames delivered to the compositor with spatial audio intact, no lossy conversion step in between.

What shipped

The player detects an Apple Immersive asset, negotiates a WebXR session with Media Layers, and hands MV-HEVC directly to the system. Spatial (ambisonic) audio rides alongside the video and is decoded on-device, so head-locked and world-locked sources stay where the creator placed them.

Why not the WebGL shortcut

The easy path is to decode into a WebGL texture and draw it on a sphere. It works, it demos well, and it throws away half the point: stereo separation gets fragile, resolution gets capped by texture limits, and spatial audio falls out of sync. We took the longer road — native compositor layers — because Immersive Video is exactly the format where the shortcuts are visible in the headset.

What it unlocks

Creators can now hand us an Apple Immersive master and get a shareable, protected link that plays natively on Vision Pro through the browser — no app install, no format gymnastics. The same pipeline that already handled VR180 and VR360 now treats Apple Immersive as a first-class citizen.

This is one entry in a longer changelog. If you want the engineering detail behind the Media Layers integration, that's its own post in Engineering.