#1554: “Cosmos in Focus” Contextualizes James Webb Telescope Images in Educational Immersive Planetarium Experience

Another Apple Vision Pro piece at SXSW 2025 was COSMOS IN FOCUS by Atlantic Studios (recently rebranded from Atlantic Productions). This was a short and sweet educational experience that allowed you to explore the imagery of the James Webb telescope, but it's both spatially contextualized in the night sky planetarium style. It is also fused together with other deep space satellite images at different scales of resolution creating this really cool zoom effect that's like a mash-up of the film POWERS OF TEN with Google Maps tiles, but in the context of space imagery. It's also an experience that demonstrates the power of collaborating with scientific researchers and subject matter experts as they're able to translate contextless 2D jpgs into an incredibly powerful immersive experience that not only preserves the original context, but leverages the immersive medium to provide many more learning opportunities. Many immersive stories on the festival circuit will shy away from more explicit didactic content or learning experiences, but this piece leans into it by reducing the choices a user can make streamlining the user journey. I also really enjoyed my conversation with Aditi Rajagopal, who led this project after transitioning from R&D and AR storytelling at Meta to immersive storytelling at Atlantic Studios. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality