Canon says it is developing a dual lens, the RF-S7.8mm F4 STM DUAL, that will let its EOS R7 camera record spatial video, the stereoscopic format played back on Apple's Vision Pro headset, and expects to sell it later this year. The lens joins the EOS VR System, which Canon introduced in 2021 and has since sold into entertainment, tourism and education.

The system records through two lenses while the light from both reaches a single sensor, which Canon says keeps the editing workflow manageable. A companion application, EOS VR Utility, converts the footage into the spatial format the headset plays. Canon calls the new lens the latest addition to that line and says it will be available in the autumn. The earlier version of the system went first to entertainment, tourism and education, which is where the clients with a reason to shoot immersive footage already were.

A format still looking for its audience

Spatial video shows how a new tool usually arrives: the hardware comes first, the audience comes later, and sometimes it never does. Watching this footage takes one particular device from one company, owned by a small number of people. That does not make the format unimportant, since the same was true of early video and cameras improved while the screens caught up, but it does mean the camera matters most to professionals paid to shoot for whoever is buying.

Canon is a camera company in a market that has shrunk for a decade, and formats like this are a way to sell lenses to the specialists who remain. Whether ordinary people ever shoot spatial video, or merely watch what a few of them make, is a question no launch date answers. For now the format is defined by the device that plays it back.