Humans have automated tasks for centuries. Now, AI companies see a path to profit in harnessing our love of efficiency, and they’ve got a name for their solution: agents.
Technology
Agents are the future AI companies promise — and desperately need
AI agents are autonomous programs that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with environments with little human input, and they’re the focus of every major company working on AI today. Microsoft has “Copilots” designed to help businesses automate things like customer service and administrative tasks. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian recently outlined a pitch for six different AI productivity agents, and Google DeepMind just poached OpenAI’s co-lead on its AI video product, Sora, to work on developing a simulation for training AI agents. Anthropic released a feature for its AI chatbot, Claude, that will let anyone create their own “AI assistant.” OpenAI includes agents as level 2 in its 5-level approach to reach AGI, or human-level artificial intelligence.
Obviously, computing is full of autonomous systems. Many people have visited a website with a pop-up customer service bot, used an automated voice assistant feature like Alexa Skills, or written a humble IFTTT script. But AI companies argue “agents” — you’d better not call them bots — are different. Instead of following a simple, rote set of instructions, they believe agents will be able to interact with environments, learn from feedback, and make decisions without constant human input. They could dynamically manage tasks like making purchases, booking travel, or scheduling meetings, adapting to unforeseen circumstances and interacting with systems that could include humans and other AI tools.
Artificial intelligence companies hope that agents will provide a way to monetize powerful, expensive AI models. Venture capital is pouring into AI agent startups that promise to revolutionize how we interact with technology. Businesses envision a leap in efficiency, with agents handling everything from customer service to data analysis. For individuals, AI companies are pitching a new era of productivity where routine tasks are automated, freeing up time for creative and strategic work. The endgame for true believers is to create AI that is a true partner, not just a tool.
“What you really want,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told MIT Technology Review earlier this year, “is just this thing that is off helping you.” Altman described the killer app for AI as a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.” It can tackle simple tasks instantly, Altman added, and for more complex ones, it will attempt them but return with questions if needed. Tech companies have been trying to automate the personal assistant since at least the 1970s, and now, they promise they’re finally getting close.
At an OpenAI press event ahead of the company’s annual Dev Day, head of developer experience Romain Huet demonstrated the company’s new Realtime API with an assistant agent. Huet gave the agent a budget and some constraints for buying 400 chocolate-covered strawberries and asked it to place an order via a phone call to a fictitious shop.
The service is similar to a Google reservation-making bot called Duplex from 2018. But that bot could only handle the simplest scenarios — it turned out a quarter of its calls were actually made by humans.
While that order was placed in English, Huet told me he gave a more complex demo in Tokyo: he prompted an agent to book a hotel room for him in Japanese where it would handle the conversation in Japanese and then call him back in English to confirm it’s done. “Of course, I wouldn’t understand the Japanese part — it just handles it,” Huet said.
But Huet’s demo immediately sparked concerns in the room full of journalists. Couldn’t the AI assistant be used for spam calls? Why didn’t it identify itself as an AI system? (Huet updated the demo for the official Dev Day, an attendee says, making the agent identify itself as “Romain’s AI Assistant.”) The unease was palpable, and it wasn’t surprising — even without agents, AI tools are already being used for deception.
There was another, arguably more immediate problem: the demo didn’t work. The agent lacked enough information and incorrectly recorded dessert flavors, causing it to auto-populate flavors like vanilla and strawberry in a column, rather than saying it didn’t have that information. Agents frequently run into issues with multi-step workflows or unexpected scenarios. And they burn more energy than a conventional bot or voice assistant. Their need for significant computational power, especially when reasoning or interacting with multiple systems, makes them costly to run at scale.
AI agents offer a leap in potential, but for everyday tasks, they aren’t yet significantly better than bots, assistants, or scripts. OpenAI and other labs aim to enhance their reasoning through reinforcement learning, all while hoping Moore’s Law continues to deliver cheaper, more powerful computing.
So, if AI agents aren’t yet very useful, why is the idea so popular? In short: market pressures. These companies are sitting on powerful but expensive technology and are desperate to find practical use cases that they can also charge users for. The gap between promise and reality also creates a compelling hype cycle that fuels funding, and it just so happens that OpenAI raised $6.6 billion right as it started hyping agents.
AI agent startups have secured $8.2 billion in investor funding over the last 12 months
Big tech companies have been rushing to integrate all kinds of “AI” into their products, but they hope AI assistants in particular could be the key to unlocking revenue. Huet’s AI calling demo outpaces what models can currently do at scale, but he told me he expects features like it to appear more commonly as soon as next year, as OpenAI refines its “reasoning” o1 model.
For now, the concept seems to be mostly siloed in enterprise software stacks, not products for consumers. Salesforce, which provides customer relationship management (CRM) software, spun up an “agent” feature to great fanfare a few weeks ahead of its annual Dreamforce conference. The feature lets customers use natural language to essentially build a customer service chatbot in a few minutes through Slack, instead of spending a lot of time coding one. The chatbots have access to a company’s CRM data and can process natural language easier than a bot not based on large language models, potentially making them better at limited tasks like asking questions about orders and returns.
AI agent startups (still an admittedly nebulous term) are already becoming quite a buzzy investment. They’ve secured $8.2 billion in investor funding over the last 12 months, spread over 156 deals, an increase of 81.4 percent year over year, according to PitchBook data. One of the better-known projects is Sierra, a customer service agent similar to Salesforce’s latest project and launched by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. There’s also Harvey, which offers AI agents for lawyers, and TaxGPT, an AI agent to handle your taxes.
Despite all the enthusiasm for agents, these high-stakes uses raise a clear question: can they actually be trusted with something as serious as law or taxes? AI hallucinations, which have frequently tripped up users of ChatGPT, currently have no remedy in sight. More fundamentally, as IBM presciently stated in 1979, “a computer can never be held accountable” — and as a corollary, “a computer must never make a management decision.” Rather than autonomous decision-makers, AI assistants are best viewed as what they truly are: powerful but imperfect tools for low-stakes tasks. Is that worth the big bucks AI companies hope people will pay?
For now, market pressures prevail, and AI companies are racing to monetize. “I think 2025 is going to be the year that agentic systems finally hit the mainstream,” OpenAI’s new chief product officer, Kevin Weil, said at the press event. “And if we do it right, it takes us to a world where we actually get to spend more time on the human things that matter, and a little less time staring at our phones.”
Technology
Atomic Picnic co-op roguelike shooter hits Steam Early Access soon
BitCake Studio and Mad Mushroom announced that the cooperative roguelike shooter Atomic Picnic will launch on Steam Early Access on November 7.
In the $20 title, players will dive into the chaos and thrill of a co-op bullet-heaven roguelike shooter and an anime-inspired visual style for an unforgettable picnic in the wasteland. BitCake Studio is a rare game studio based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (I visited the city as part of our brief Brazil global gaming tour recently).
Players team up with up to three fellow “Loners” and embark on scavenger hunts known as “Picnics.” Each adventure pits you against relentless waves of monsters, objectives, and hulking bosses to ensure that no two Picnics are ever alike.
Run, gun, explore, collect, upgrade, and decimate – every Picnic offers a unique experience, filled with diverse upgrade paths and special events that challenge both solo adventurers and groups.
A final public playtest for Atomic Picnic is now available on Steam and will run until October 17. Hop in, run some Picnics with friends, and give feedback in the Atomic Picnic Discord as the devs at BitCake fine-tune, balance, and polish the game in time for Early Access.
In early access, the developers at BitCake Studio are introducing a wave of features for Loners to cut their Picnic teeth on. There are four hungry Loners: Ash, Hani, Bonnie, and JD. Each Loner boasts unique stats and abilities, allowing for varying playstyles. Try each out and find which suits you. You can permanently upgrade character stats via Mementos, which are acquired through Discoveries as Loners complete Picnics.
Loners will scour maps for valuable resources that unlock 18 different Mementos: character and gear upgrades for future runs. Completing specific challenges within Picnics will reveal Discoveries, which in turn grant new Mementos, characters, and weapons.
The game has three maps. In Train Plateau, you set up your Picnic in an abandoned trainyard, ripe for resource scavenging. If you’re lucky, you might find something worth cold cash! You can also come back to the Plateau in night mode, facing off against a different set of even tougher enemies.
In Twilight Dam, you figure out what cataclysmic event ravaged this dam. Picnic here to explore this mysteriously wrecked rift, in day or night mode. And in City of Sand, there are two dimensions, one city. Explore and Picnic in a glorious city caught within the sands of time…or what’s left of it.
In-run upgrades known as Curios represent the dramatic changes a Loner’s build will go through as they progress a Picnic. Standard Curios unleash your Loner’s full potential as its stats and abilities dynamically adapt to every acquired Curios.
Austin, Texas-based Mad Mushroom is a game publishing company positioned as a next-generation influencer-owned entity within the vast umbrella of OTK Network. Mad Mushroom wants to empower indie developers, engage gamers, and shape the future of interactive entertainment.
BitCake Studios is a game development studio from Brazil, creating games that bring people together since 2013. Hailing from Rio de Janeiro, BitCake is a completely remote studio with coworkers from different cities around the country and the world.
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Servers computers
Best Server for Home: Small, Medium, Large (What Server Should I Get?)
What is the best setup and configuration for a Server at Home or your #homelab?
Do you go Small, Medium or Large? The options are endless!
To get started you need to come up with a plan, what is the purpose of this Server? How much will you spend and are you going to put it in a Server rack or not?
Then think about whether you want to go small, medium or large format with the computer/server? Small is convinient, low power, however doesn’t give you the power or grunt of a higher end server, which is also bulkier and noisier.
The choise is yours…
Get Pulseway (25% off) – https://bit.ly/emilio_pulseway
Keep your Tech Secure and Monitored!!
Here are few computers / servers that I use and recommend.
➤ Raspberry Pi – https://amzn.to/3nsyShB
➤ Protectli PC – https://amzn.to/44QQnbJ
➤ Intel NUC Mini PC – https://amzn.to/3VJuer9
➤ ZimaBoard Server – https://amzn.to/3TNA4rM
➤ HP Elitedesk – https://amzn.to/3Zok4O6
➤ Mac Mini – https://amzn.to/40rsWE7
➤ Beelink Mini – https://amzn.to/3TLzV8t
———TIMESTAMPS———
0:00 What is what?
0:22 What is a Server?
1:38 Sponsor – Pulseway
2:48 The Purpose of the Server
4:02 Consider your Budget
4:28 Where will the Server Live?
5:02 Storage Requirements
5:51 Mini Computers / Servers
7:31 Desktop Computers / Servers
8:10 Laptop Servers
8:35 Rack + Blade Servers
10:34 Cloud Servers
11:29 The Verdict
———————————————
STUFF I RECOMMEND
👉 Speed up Your Mac – http://bit.ly/CleanMyMacX2
👉 Best to run Windows on Mac – https://bit.ly/parallelsemilio
✖️ https://x.com/emilio_tech
☎️ Want to work or collaborate together? Reach me at contact@emilioaguero.net
——————————————————
🎓 MY TRAINING COURSES 🎓 https://bit.ly/emilio-training
My popular courses –
➤ Become an IT Manager – https://bit.ly/emilioaguero-techmanager
➤ Master Cybersecurity – https://bit.ly/emilioaguero-cyberexpert
➤ QNAP NAS Administration – https://bit.ly/emilioaguero-learnqnap
➤ Master the Synology NAS – https://bit.ly/LearnSynology
➤ Become a VMware Expert – https://bit.ly/emilioaguero-vmware8
➤ Learn Windows Server 2022 – https://bit.ly/server-2022
——————————————————
MY GEAR (some of it…)
➤ Intel NUC Mini PC – https://amzn.to/3VJuer9
➤ ZimaBoard Server – https://amzn.to/3TNA4rM
➤ Raspberry Pi – https://amzn.to/3nsyShB
➤ Teltonika RUTX50 – https://bit.ly/teltonika-emilio
➤ NAS 2-Bay | Terramaster FS0210 – https://amzn.to/44ORHN0
➤ NAS 6-Bay | Synology DS1621+ – https://amzn.to/3xUl5Wi
➤ NAS Rack | QNAP Rack – https://amzn.to/44frTdb
➤ 34″ Curved Wide Monitor – https://amzn.to/4aL6zyF
➤ Digital Camera | Sony A7C – https://amzn.to/3VVt4KB
➤ Shure SM7B Mic – https://amzn.to/3MjPRgc
➤ Speakers | Presonus XT – https://amzn.to/49XH2RH
👉 Full List of my Gear: https://www.amazon.com/shop/techwithemilio
——————————————————
ABOUT ME:
My name is Emilio Aguero and I’m a technology enthusiast from Melbourne Australia. I’ve been into computers ever since setting up my first pentium computer years ago. I love technology and make videos about all things tech every week. Would love it if you support my channel by subscribing and staying up to date with what I’m releasing!
⮕⮕ New Videos Sundays 2pm GMT ⬅⬅
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GET IN TOUCH:
👉 For any speaker, consulting, affiliate or sponsorship enquiries reach me at – contact@emilioaguero.net
Check Out My Other Channels –
🖥️ Let’s Talk Tech https://www.youtube.com/@TechWithEmilio
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🚶Walking the Globe https://www.youtube.com/@WeLikeWalking .
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Technology
Numeric grabs $28M Series A to automate accounting using AI
Accountants typically dread month-end and quarter-end closings. That’s because finalizing financial records for a specific period is generally a manual, error-prone and time-consuming endeavor.
In 2020, Parker Gilbert (pictured above; middle) was so fed up with the tedium of managing finance and accounting at an early-stage startup that he decided to co-found Numeric, an accounting software that automates certain parts of the book-closing process. And the introduction of genAI several years later significantly enhanced Numeric’s capabilities, so much so that it’s now used by the accounting departments of companies like Brex, OpenAI, Plaid and Wealthfront.
Over the last year, Numeric’s revenue has increased four-fold to the single-digit millions, and investors are suddenly flocking to back the company. Now, just five months after it raised a $10 million seed round from a slew of well-known investors, the company has raised a $28 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from new investors IVP and Socii. Previous backers Founders Fund, Long Journey, 8VC, Friends & Family Capital, and Fifth Down also invested in this round.
Numeric lets accounting teams shave days off their monthly book-closing process, Gilbert told TechCrunch. The company’s product achieves this by aggregating and reconciling data from various accounting systems and Excel spreadsheets. It then overlays that data with an AI agent, which looks for how each line item changed from the previous month. If the agent spots outliers or unexpected variations, it explains why the account has increased or decreased, saving accountants a lot of time they would otherwise spend documenting variance in accounts — a process known as flux analysis.
Gilbert, the CEO of the startup, explained with an example: If the AI agent notices that Numeric’s legal expenses were much higher in October than in September, it would write an explanation along the lines of, “Your legal expenses went up this month because you paid Wilson Sonsini $X amount more for your funding.”
The possibility of AI hallucinations in the flux analysis commentary is one of the first concerns to come to mind, but Gilbert stressed that’s typically not a problem — he said Numeric always provides links so accountants can check the AI agent’s work at any time.
While the actual tie-out and calculations are not done by generative AI at the moment, Gilbert expects Numeric’s model to soon be capable of doing that accurately. “In terms of synthesizing large quantities of data, LLMs are incredibly good at this today, and I think are going to only increasingly get better,” he added.
Croom Beatty, a partner at Menlo Ventures, said he has spent a lot of time looking for a company that is disrupting accounting software, and Numeric was one of the first startups in the category to pique his interest.
“Numeric’s moat is a lot deeper than a lot of areas we were looking at,” he said. “It marries complex workflow with complex data in a market that has not been well served by tech companies.”
Beatty expects the company will be able to add other products in the future, such as financial planning and analysis capabilities — a market that Anaplan now dominates.
Numeric competes with two accounting software companies: Publicly-traded Blackline, and FloQast, an 11-year-old startup that was valued at $1.6 billion when it raised its Series E this April.
As for why there aren’t other, new AI-powered entrants in the accounting software market, Beatty said what Numeric is doing is very complex and not easily replicable.
Servers computers
NVIDIA, price of 1 chip? price of 1 server rack? #ai #nvidia #nvda
@FinanceAndBagels FULL VIDEO HERE .
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Technology
Submerged is everything impressive and isolating about the Vision Pro
I don’t like submarines. The idea of being trapped, several hundred feet underwater, in a narrow, creaking death trap? No thanks. I already knew that going into a screening of Submerged, the first scripted short film shot in Apple Immersive Video for the Vision Pro. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m triply sure.
Written and directed by Oscar winner Edward Berger, Submerged takes place inside a WWII submarine that’s under attack. It follows the crew as they try to escape a sinking submarine. I, however, was seated comfortably in 2024 on a couch at Apple’s demo space in Manhattan. There weren’t any other theatergoers because I was going to strap the theater to my face. It was a little weird. At least, until the film got going. Then, I, too, was inside a WWII submarine.
Watching an immersive film inside the Vision Pro is an odd thing. On the one hand, it’s hard to forget you’re in a headset. But, unlike a regular film, I have a ghostly sort of agency inside the narrative. The action can be happening with the main characters, but I’m not obligated to watch them. You can instead focus on the extras in the background. I can — and did — occasionally choose to turn my head to stare at the rivets in the submarine’s metal walls or beads of condensation in a torpedo tube (also, rudely, a roach skittering across the floor). Sometimes, I’d turn around to see if this Submerged world had 360 degrees like the real one. Spoiler: it doesn’t. This fictional world spans 180 degrees, and once you reach the border, it fades to black.
The experience feels like a cross between playing a video game and viewing Sleep No More, an immersive version of Macbeth where the audience traipses through a creepy hotel as the play unfolds around them. Scenes move slower, as if you’re being invited to gawp at your surroundings. At the same time, you’re not fully free to explore. There’s still a story that Berger is trying to tell — you’re just along for the ride.
All of that is a natural part of adapting traditional filmmaking to a more immersive 180-degree field of view. “That frame is very large and you need to fill that frame with things that happen, things that could be of interest to the audience,” Berger says. “Every extra counts in this, every piece of equipment, every piece of bursting pipe or element in the frame counts. You can’t really cheat.”
That wide field of view comes with its own obstacles. Mics and lighting have to be built into the scenery. Berger says he had to storyboard everything, create a short animated film based on that, and then watch it in the Vision Pro to get a sense for how the camera would move. Berger also wore the headset when filming started to figure out how shots would look.
The result is impressive. As water rushed into this fictional submarine, I could taste the faint memory of salt water on my tongue. When characters walked down narrow submarine corridors, I felt claustrophobic. During a scene where sailors shoved a torpedo into its launch tube, I instinctively stretched my hands out. For a split second, I thought they were loading it straight into my chest.
“My main agenda is to make you feel what the main character is feeling, to sort of have you go through what they’re doing,” Berger says. On that front, Submerged is incredibly successful. It’s when you remember you’re in a headset that the rest of the world comes rushing back in.
Watching the film, you become very aware there’s no one else experiencing this with you. There’s no one else gasping at harrowing moments. There’s no one to lock eyes with, as if to say “Whoa, did you see that, too?” If you were to SharePlay this, you’d just see the ghostly Persona of a friend who isn’t actually there. And then you’d miss out on the whole immersive aspect. When you think about it that way, Submerged is something you have to experience alone.
Watching the film, you become very aware there’s no one else experiencing this with you
Owning (or borrowing) a Vision Pro is also the only way to see Submerged. That’s inherently lonely. The only people I’ve really been able to chat about this experience with were Apple employees and Berger himself. Now that the film is available, I’ll have to wait for the two people I know in real life with a Vision Pro to carve out time in their schedule to see it. When I try to explain it to my spouse, they are unmoved.
Ostensibly, Apple wants these immersive films to serve as a selling point for the Vision Pro. Come, spend $3,500, and see for yourself what the magic is all about. There’s a logic to it. Submerged is truly a technologically impressive proof-of-concept for high-quality immersive content. It’s just also a hard experience to share. I can’t say with a straight face that this is the killer reason anyone should buy one of these things, especially since this was only a roughly 17-minute film. That’s long enough for things to feel snappy and fresh. I’m not sure how well the immersive aspect would hold up over a two-hour feature.
“Not every movie is going to be made on these headsets. It’s not necessary. It would be a waste of resources and waste of time,” Berger acknowledges. Instead, he sees the Vision Pro as another tool in the belt. “Not every movie is supposed to be for every medium. But if I have the right story, I think, ‘I’m excited about telling this and about pushing the medium forward.’”
That’s sort of the quagmire all mixed reality tech is stuck in. It can be magical. When you try it, you can see why some people are inspired and excited. And then, when you inevitably take the headsets off, it’s hard to explain to anyone why the world inside the headset is better than the one outside it. “Pushing boundaries” isn’t all that convincing of a reason. Watching Submerged is like this, too. For all the artistry and technological prowess that went into making this film, I’ve never needed the Vision Pro to imagine how terrifying a sinking submarine could be. It’s just not necessary for immersing yourself in a good story.
Technology
Submerged is Vision Pro’s claustrophobic thrill ride that’s short on depth but long on immersion
Claustrophobia and barely contained panic were my two overriding emotions as I experienced Apple’s first-ever immersive narrative short film on its Vision Pro mixed reality headset.
The aptly titled Submerged, which arrives on Vision Pro headsets around the world today, tells the harrowing 17-minute tale of a World War II submarine tasked with tracking ships in enemy waters.
If you’re even remotely a World War II history buff or film fan, you’ve heard of or seen tales like this before but I doubt you’ve seen it in this fashion.
Written and directed by award-winning director Edward Berger, the film tells a tight tale of a submarine crew under siege. It’s remarkable not necessarily because the story is new or nuanced but because of how it employs immersive video techniques to put you in the middle of the action.
When I watched the film, I could look around the tight cabin – an expertly built set that, owing to the Vision Pro’s high-resolution displays and the close confines – used all metals to make the recreation remarkably realistic.
The story starts slowly to, perhaps, help introduce you to the main protagonist, crewman James Dyson (expertly played by Jordan Barton), his shipmates, and the mundanity of their existence some 400 ft below the surface of the sea.
One thing I noticed was how Berger switched back and forth between using the 360-degree view capabilities of a VR headset (all shot on Apple’s proprietary camera) like the Vision Pro, and pulling the focus in tightly to direct your gaze. The closeups of Barton were tight enough that I could make out the pores on his face.
I often find the experience of watching a movie in Vision Pro calming almost to the point of sleepiness. As the early minutes of the short film plugged along, I found my attention waning – that is, until the ship was struck by something and shook wildly. I was so startled that I almost jumped off the couch I was sitting on.
From that moment forward, the film seemed to press in on me and its characters. I enjoyed Berger’s varied propositioning of the camera. At one point a 20-ft torpedo was essentially loaded into my chest – at least from my point of view. At another, the main character was staring warily right into my eyes.
When one of the torpedo tubes burst open and flames and sparks formed overhead, all hell broke loose. Within seconds there were geysers of water shooting into my and the main character’s faces.
As the water poured in and rose around us – yes, I soon felt like a part of this – my unease grew. It was clear the water was just below my nose. I’m a little claustrophobic in real life so I was soon repeating a mantra of “no no no no” in my head. To achieve some of this effect, they shot the film in a giant custom-built tank and in open water where they slowly submerged some parts of the set.
There’s virtually no exposition so I never entirely understood how [spoiler alert] the enemy found them, attacked, and eventually destroyed their sub. Miraculously, all the crewmen survived. This being an Apple immersive film, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.
Apple is still mainly interested in delivering relatively brief immersive experiences. It’s queued up a new NBA All-Star weekend movie that, while just four minutes or so long, truly puts you in the middle of the three-day event. I don’t even follow basketball but found it entertaining (the basketball to my face was a nice touch).
Apple is also lining up more Adventure and Elevated episodes, including one for Maine. There are more concert experiences on the way, like one from The Weekend and another from R.A.E.
I’ve enjoyed most of my immersive experiences and, if you have a Vision Pro, it’s one of the coolest ways to use your mixed-reality headset. Are they and this entertaining and somewhat anxiety-inducing film reason enough to spend $3,500 for a Vision Pro? I’ll leave that up to you.
I naturally had a lot of questions about the creation of this immersive, short film, so I turned to the director Edward Berger, who also directed the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, for a deeper look at how he created Submerged and the choices he made to bring it to Vision Pro. Our conversation has been edited and shortened for clarity.
A conversation with the director
I saw the behind-the-scenes video short, and what I noticed is that during the making of the film, you appeared to be wearing the Vision Pro headset. So I guess I was curious if that was designed so you would have a feed and know exactly what the scene was going to play out like for people who were wearing headsets themselves.
Berger: In our shooting experience, we designed the pipeline so that we were able to watch the take through the Vision Pro and experience life as the actors were doing it.
I started changing my habit a little bit during production because you learn your brain rewires very quickly to the Apple Vision Pro. It learns the tools, it learns the visuals, it learns the techniques, very quickly how it feels, what what you can use. And so maybe halfway through the shoot, I sort of alternated between just watching the actors on my monitor, [we had] two monitors. One was just the field division and one was the entire 180 degrees sort of whatever was in the frame everywhere.
So, I watched those just to – sometimes it felt a little bit more direct to me and I could imagine the effect that I would have in the Apple Vision Pro because I had learned it within the previous three weeks of using this tool.
Were there any technical surprises as you were preparing to do this or even as you were doing it?
Absolutely. I mean, not surprises so much because we tested it extensively, but certain things that we knew, we’re gonna have to push the limit here in terms of movement, camera movement. How much can you shake it? What kind of dolly moves, crane moves can you make? Can you do a three-axis move, or is it better just to move on one axis? Just do push-ins or trackbacks or things like that.
So just all these things you need to test to know how is it gonna feel when you put on the put on the glasses, but also, you know, very quickly it became clear to us, okay, well where are we gonna hide the equipment? You know, where are we gonna put the lights? Where are we gonna put the microphones? Very quickly we realize, okay, we’re gonna have to integrate everything into the set.
The set looked great, by the way. It looked looked realistic. Had you ever shot a VR film before?
No. First experience, first stereoscopic experience. I’d never even put on any VR glasses. I mean, except for in a museum, maybe for a few minutes, when there’s a long line behind a view, so it was a wonderful way of getting to the technology diving into it, exploring ways of telling a story in a different way.
Do you now own a Vision Pro?
Absolutely, and I use it a lot. It’s a great great way to watch movies.
How long was the entire shoot?
I think we shot for 10 days. Tested maybe for a week and then shot for 10 days.
It sounds like it took more planning maybe than a traditional movie because of things like having to hide equipment.
Yeah, it did take a lot of planning. It took quite a while – but you know, also we had a tight timeline. So in a way, it was like we had to work around the clock to make this film to be able to premiere it right now for you. I mean, we shot it in April and it has a long post-production process. Yeah, a lot of planning, but a lot of around-the-clock work as well.
Did you get to show it to Tim Cook?
I mean, I know he watched it. I wasn’t present in the room when he watched it.
With the amount of preparation and the way you had to manage things, was there any room for improvisation?
No. I’m not, in general, I’m not a big fan of improvisation. I like movies where I can see that the filmmaker has put a lot of thought into the design of it, into the making of it. To then react on the day, I don’t call improvisation where I said, okay, let’s make it better. We have this shot planned, but actually it would be much better from here with the actors doing this, let’s react to that. But I like when movies are well thought through and precise and so I’m not the right person to ask that question.
I’m sure there’s somebody else, an improvisational filmmaker who will put the Apple Vision Pro to great use.
I noticed in the shooting in the movie that sometimes I could look around and see a lot of stuff, and other times my view was directed, narrowed in a way focused. So I was just curious how you decided to make that choice where sometimes we were experiencing it fully and sometimes we were just like – the main character was really in our face and that was kind of what you saw. If you look to the edges, they were kind of darkened.
It is. I mean, it’s in a way like in a traditional movie, I would say it’s the use of a closeup. When you say, okay, I really want it to have an emotional impact for the viewer, have them be very close to our character to experience what they are experiencing. And so you direct the eyes, the gaze like that, but usually, I mean, this device, the great thing is that the audience can design their own experience.
It’s almost like theater in a way. You have very wide shots, not your field of vision necessarily, but to the left, right, up and down, there’s a lot beyond the frame that you can see, and hear, and to then use that entire frame, the entire 180 degrees to fill it with sound or other action like a bursting pipe or steam coming somewhere, was super interesting to us, and therefore you also need more time to explore these things. You can let the shots linger so that you, Lance, can look around, you know, that we can give you the time and space to do that.
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