On January 22, 2025, Damien Stolarz, CEO of Evercast, joined host Arin Sime to discuss how his team added real-time communications into Apple Vision Pro for a collaboration experience like none other. Evercast is a high-resolution, high-color, ultra-low-latency, surround-sound conferencing and streaming software. It’s used for secure remote editing and finishing of films and TV shows, and was used in 60% of Oscar nominated films last year.
In the conversation, they cover use cases and the technology needed to combine WebRTC with spatial computing. We’ll talk about why WebRTC was so helpful for this application, the technical complexities of running WebRTC on Apple Vision Pro, and the security and encryption considerations that are required when working with sensitive digital media content.
Bonus Content
- Our regular monthly industry chat with Tsahi Levent-Levi. This month’s topic: How AI and GenAI are used in WebRTC Algorithms.
Watch Episode 98!
Key Insights
⚡ Spatial computing is changing the digital space. Spatial computing represents the next big leap in technology, and leading the charge is the Apple Vision Pro, a device that redefines what immersive experiences can be. Damien explains. ”Spatial computing is a little bit of a new way of talking about the topic. But if you look at this Vision Pro here, we’ve had a lot of things, we’ve had terms like DR and XR extended reality, but what spatial computing is, it’s a new way of anchoring your visual world in the real world. So if you’re looking at content, it can be over there, it can be over there, and it’s attached to the physical space that you’re interacting around.”
⚡ WebRTC is helping reinvent video collaboration, especially in high-stakes industries. In big-budget movie productions, managing workflows across various teams is essential to ensure smooth production. Damien and his company, Evercast, are using WebRTC to streamline these processes. He explains, ”They’re spending 400 million on this movie. Well, all these steps require the best decision makers to be green lighting each step. […] By using Evercast and by using WebRTC technologies, which can create sufficient quality, sufficient color, sufficient resolution, you’re able to have people not have to fly out, get a hotel, be on set, they can also, a lot of times a producer might be involved with two or three different productions at once, and you need to make sure that this person can keep tabs on all of them.”
⚡ Digital security is a continuous commitment, not a one-time fix. WebRTC’s end-to-end encryption was a key step in securing online communication. However, true security requires ongoing effort and adaptation. As Damien explains, “ I think it was a couple of years ago that WebRTC finally enabled end-to-end encryption, and we activated that immediately. The late Dr. Alex was an advisor to the company and was working very closely with us day in and day out. He was on all the standards groups. And so we always adopted every feature of WebRTC as it came. Once we got those end-to-end streams, that was only the beginning. […] So, it’s an ongoing thing because it’s one thing to say, Oh, the technology will take care of it all and then somebody sticky notes their password. So, we’ve done everything that you can do with WebRTC, plus we added a couple of unique things.”
Episode Highlights
How WebRTC is revolutionizing creative collaboration
Evercast is leveraging WebRTC in the best way possible—bringing remote participants together from different scenarios to enable a smoother creative process. Damien explains how it all started:
“The idea was to solve the problem of people needing to be in two different places and create a high-quality technical product relating to the creative arts. The first use of it was actually on the Godzilla movie in 2017. So there were many years of development to get it to where it needed to be both on a security basis and a quality basis and it allowed the editor to be completely remote from the director and actually have a more efficient, a better than in-person experience and to basically shave off a lot of time on the production as a result. So Evercast has been using WebRTC technologies for creative collaboration.”
High-quality content standards are crucial in creative industries
In creative industries like film and gaming, every detail matters. That’s why tools like Apple Vision Pro stand out—they provide just what the creatives need to deliver the best possible experience. Damien explains, “ It’s almost like, as an analogy, MP3 destroys audio. And anyone who’s what they call a ‘golden ear’ will listen to an MP3 of a song, especially like a 128 MP3, and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t even deal with this.’ Well, imagine doing that to your video. Looks good enough for the rest of us, but the people who edit high-end content aren’t the rest of us. They’re ‘golden eye, golden ear’ people who look at this content. And so, we had to create a tool with a color pipeline that was capable of rendering a good enough experience that creative decisions could be made with fidelity.”
Spatial communication is the future of creative industries
Spatial formats and VR promise to change how creatives bring their ideas to life and communicate with each other. JP Castel, CSO at Everlast, shares his thoughts on where things are headed:
“ We exist in the entertainment space, which is all about what is sexy. So I think Apple does a great job in this regard, and they’ve been wonderful partners to build on a platform. I think they really push the boundaries of what’s possible. But yeah, we’ve had an Oculus, and I used to be a VR producer in commercials for a long time, and we used that as a tool. I think that as we move forward, we will definitely be exploring spatial in a variety of products. I can’t say anything at this moment, but I think that there’s a wide landscape, and we’re trying to find the singular shared sort of process of how to do this because we’ve been showing planar, we’ve been showing 3D monoscopic projection. These are all nice ways to use 2D imagery, but the next challenge is what is that next spatial format? Is it powered by Unreal? Is it a Nerf? Is it something that we haven’t thought of? How do you share that experience? So, I think everyone is trying to find an answer for that. And we’re on the leading edge of that.”
Up Next! WebRTC Live Episode 99
Running WebRTC Media Servers in Kubernetes
with Péter Megyesi, CEO of L7mp
Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at 12:30 pm Eastern.
