An early spatial experience
Long before Apple Vision Pro, there was QuickTime VR.
Last week the Apple community celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh, and later this week we’ll enter the era of spatial computing with the launch of Apple Vision Pro. With that in mind, it feels like an oddly relevant time to dive into one of the Mac’s oldest spatial experiences — The Apple Company Store in QuickTime VR. This demo software helped inform my newsletter remembering Apple Infinite Loop earlier this month.
Despite the profound impact Apple Vision Pro will have on the Apple Retail experience, I’ve scarce mentioned it here on Tabletops, and that’s no accident. A major new platform deserves careful study and an awful lot of context — the kind that’s only possible to grasp when the product is available in stores.
The future makes more sense when you understand the past, which is why I’m sharing this slice of history with you today.
Let’s take it back to the mid-90s. The Mac was newer than the original iPad is today, and Apple was busy developing QuickTime VR, an image format designed to allow people to explore spatial environments on multimedia CD-ROMs. To showcase the power and potential of VR, Apple started at home and released a demo CD featuring a virtual tour of The Company Store.
It’s important to recognize that Apple had essentially no owned retail experience at this time. The first Apple Stores wouldn’t open for another six years, and the CompUSA “store within a store” project hadn’t yet been dreamed up. The Macintosh story had grown bloated, stale, and nearly impossible to concisely communicate within the confines of store shelves.
To launch The Company Store tour and extract its assets, I emulated Mac OS 9 with SheepShaver and ran the demo on an iMac G5 in the Classic environment. At the time the demo was released, System 7 was new.
The CD includes more than just the store: there’s a virtual tour of The White House and scenes from notable locations around the world, like The Champs-Élysées. (Sadly, Apple’s future home is not visible.) There’s even a rendered recreation of Apple’s Valley Green 6 offices in Cupertino.
The demo launches full-screen and displays a 3D, rotating Apple shopping bag on the welcome screen. The walk movie in my article plays as you “enter” the store.
Inside, the 3D environment is displayed next to a store planogram filled with tiny dots. Clicking on any dot jumps to its corresponding department. You can pan, zoom, and click through scenes in the 3D viewport. Compared to the Apple Stores you know and love today, the merchandising in this demo is surreal.
At the entrance to the store is a physical map of the space, like the kind you’d find at a trailhead or in a museum lobby. In the Performa department, a cutout of a child hanging upside down looms from the ceiling. Along the wall is a disheveled pile of AppleDesign Speaker boxes. In the Newton department, an entire wall is wrapped with a print of someone’s backside, toting a Newton in their jeans pocket.
One section of the store is filled with more than 700 software titles. In early promotional materials, Apple called this aisle “Technology Way,” which is so similar to the “Software Alley” in early Apple Stores that I can’t help but wonder if it was carried over.
On the products tab is a range of Macs and Apple-branded merchandise. Some, but not all of the products can be rotated in 3D. But these products aren’t 3D models. Each one is an essentially a video with frames representing every angle. That means you can play them back as movie files:
Here’s the full range of products available in the demo. The documentation noted that this selection did not represent all merchandise available at the time:
As far as I’m aware, Apple never released an updated version of The Company Store demo, but QuickTime VR continued to play a role in the Apple Retail experience for many years. In 2001, Apple published a VR tour of its first stores online. In 2006, QuickTime VR made possible tours of Apple Fifth Avenue. And starting in 2011, Apple began publishing 360-degree panoramas of significant new stores in the same spirit. Today’s augmented reality product models in the Apple Store app, in a way, come from a 3D tradition that began almost 30 years ago.
India Art Fair
Today at Apple isn’t in the spotlight often these days, but something special is coming to New Delhi. Apple is once again offering a series of workshops — Digital Artists in Residence - Forces of Nature — in cooperation with the India Art Fair.
Over the course of the weekend, our Digital Artists in Residence will present new immersive works designed to inspire your own creative exploration in sessions using iPad — all guided by the theme, Forces of Nature. You can also learn new digital art skills in Art Tours and Workshops with our Apple Creative Pros.
This is the first time Apple has participated in the India Art Fair since Apple Stores opened in India, but these events are happening outside of the store, at the Digital Residency Hub on the Art Fair grounds. Featured at the fair will be a project by notable artist duo Thukral and Tagra, who’ve collaborated with Apple several times in the past.
Featured image
Apple Marina Bay Sands
Illustration via @isabel.dlfuente.