A.R. Rahman, an Academy Award and Grammy-winning composer who is popular in India, is launching a musical art app called ARR Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, bringing spatial storytelling and original immersive experiences to visionOS.
A producer and storyteller, Rahman is launching the new visionOS app delivering immersive storytelling and music experiences in spatial computing. The app launches today (July 22) on the Apple App Store for Apple Vision Pro.
The ARR Immersive app launches with original content created exclusively for the platform, including three Kathak dance performances fused with Western classical compositions, Clair de Lune (rendered in immersive spatial audio for the first time), Rachmaninoff, and Fur Elise, performed by Pranith AP, Palak Chauhan, and Mudra IV, with choreography by Kathak dancer Shrita Baskar. The pieces pair some of the most recognizable compositions in the Western classical canon with Indian classical dance.
The app also features exclusive immersive content from Le Musk, Rahman’s acclaimed 360° VR film that premiered at the Cannes XR Festival, re-edited specifically for Vision Pro’s centered viewing experience.
New spatial audio mixes were created specifically for this app using Apple’s ASAF (Apple Spatial Audio Format), Apple’s proprietary format designed for Vision Pro to deliver three-dimensional, lifelike audio presence. ARR Live, a dedicated section for Rahman’s concert performances and recorded live performances, is also available within the app. More content is currently in production for future releases.
“My journey with immersive storytelling began over a decade ago with Le Musk, exploring new languages of story through 3D, 360° VR, spatial experiences and scent. The ARR Immersive App was born from a desire to go further, where technology doesn’t replace emotion, but deepens it,” said Rahman.
The ARR Immersive App is available on the Apple App Store for Apple Vision Pro, launching first on Apple Vision Pro, coming soon to Meta Quest.
Rahman is one of the most influential composers, producers, and musical visionaries of our time. With over 150 million records sold worldwide, his body of work spans more than three decades and includes iconic scores for Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, Roja, Bombay, Lagaan, and hundreds of other landmark productions across Indian and international cinema. A recipient of two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA Award, Rahman is among the most decorated musicians in the world.
Here’s more of our conversation about the project, and his views on art, technology and making things that linger in your mind.
A 10 year journey to the Apple Vision Pro
In our interview, Rahman said he got interested in virtual reality around 10 years back because, as a film industry musician and composer, he thought about what could come next in entertainment.
“When VR came, one of my friends gave me the Google adapter on the phone, and I was blown away by the immersion of that, the 3D, and even though the workflow was so bad and there were no cameras, it took a while for us to learn. We shot Le Musk in 2016 and 2017,” Rahman said.
It took another six or seven years post-production because of how the technology was so nascent and the tools were not advance.
“We were persistent, and when we finished that, Apple said that they were going to come up with something, and when that came out, it definitely was Apple quality. It was so good that we upscaled many things” and decided to make an immersive app.
“The app could be a conduit for my expansive, more as a storyteller, and extending from my musicality to storytelling and technology and for people to see my world, what I see in my vision, in my mind, and so Le Musk and the new Anohkia, which we are producing now, is an Indian-based English story about a 15th-century codicil, and then also showcasing an extraordinary fusion of Western classical music and Indian dance from some of the brilliant students from my conservatory,” Rahman said.
He added, “We have as an educational experience, where I think these kids are world class, and the world should see them in a very unique way. And so we filmed that with the Blackmagic camera (or digital film), to the highest quality. So I wanted to put something which won’t be accessed by many people, and because we are so desensitized by ramrodding information clips and things, but people — when they experience what they experience in Apple Vision Pro or that quality — would definitely feel the difference.”
The upscaling of Le Musk took a while to get done, but filming 360-degree videos with newer cameras was a lot faster.
“Even though we use terabytes of drives for backup, the workflow is much simpler now than before. We can shoot something and immediately see it the next day or say evening on a proxy. But before it used to be let’s wait for the stitches to come back. It’s not good. Let’s go reshoot. It was like an ancient filmmaking process where filaments are developing because the stitching took a lot of time back in those days. The Jaunt cameras felt like 24 different cameras,” Rahman said.
Now the cameras like Blackmagic speed the stitching of 360 videos together into a seamless experience. The team also uses cameras like the GH Series Panasonic Lumix camera for close-ups with fantastic quality.
“We build our own rig for that. It’s a little erratic because it’s our own rig,” he said. “When you shoot something, we have a big camera like Blackmagic, and then we have cutaways which are smaller cameras. Like even the Canon VR.”
Capturing different worlds as a filmmaker, composer, performer and educator
Rahman said the ARR Immersive app has a variety of different worlds which Rahman has captured as a filmmaker, as a composer, performer, and as an educator.
“I cherry pick everything and start putting up things. Each experience is about three to four minutes,” he said.
I asked him what his favorite moments of creation were. He said he loved the variety of roles.
“I think when I’m playing different parts. Like one is as a director, storyteller, educator, and then then as a performer,” he said.
He noted that Le Musk is a larger experience, which premiered at Cannes XR and had installations in Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, Canada, and Singapore. It’s a 37-minute experience about a girl whose parents gets murdered, and she finds the killers through the scent. The scent experience wasn’t available on the Vision Pro, but it was in available in an earleir experience with a multi-sensory VR chair dubbed Positron.
“I thought many people had asked me to see Le Musk” with the highest possible quality, on the Apple Vision Pro, he said.
An art showcase, not a commercial venture
On the commercial side, I asked Rahman what the opportunity was. Was he selling the app at a fixed price, or did Apple give him money? He said neither was true. Apple is just hosting a showcase of art. Some of the apps within ARR Immersive are available for purchase, but others are free experiences.
“This is one of our first attempts on this side of the world, and we are just testing the ground to see how people are reacting to it,” he said. “Since we have all the equipment, we can produce any content or any artistic experience in a faster way than how the first one took like eight years to produce. We are proud of it still, and watch it.”
In this way, the ARR Immersive app is really a pilot to see what works with audiences when it comes to beautiful content coming out of India.
I asked what he can do on the Apple Vision Pro that can be done on other XR platforms.
“I think basically the quality is a quantum jump. The way Apple hosts things, and it’s all in the whole 360 systems. People who are Apple fans and who are into quality, maybe there are a lot of people who are going to buy the Apple Vision Pro because of this experience or this band because there are a lot of buy fans out in the U.S. or Australia or Europe, and it’s interesting. Let’s see what what happens,” Rahman said.
If it goes well, Rahman intends to do more. He’s working with a virtual band dubbed Secret Mountain, which has six people from different countries in a project for Meta.
In the long term, I asked if he thought that Apple Vision Pro would be an interesting platform for art.
“I’m sure that Apple will be working on something more, and it’s a good thing to invest now in the app so that you can switch over to the newer version,” he said.
Art, technology and emotion
I noted that he invests in technology ahead of its time.
“Yeah, I’ve been in this now almost 10 years now because we started buying all these cameras and using all this stuff, getting used to the workflows for the past 10 years, and our whole team has been built around it. And it’s like a lone ranger, but when the Apple Vision Pro came out, it felt like finally there is a good outlet,” Rahman said. “Even though it’s not a massive following, at least a niche amount of people have it, and probably this app will be a reason for them to put on the Apple Vision Pro and experience things which are not available easily.”
He also said he loved the volumetric capture of people and their faces that the Apple Vision Pro can use in its communications calls where it feels like you are with people in mixed reality.
“It’s scary real,” Rahman said. “But once they perfect that service, we can be in a real environment with avatars like floating around, and I think you can see that possibly coming to,” he said.
Rahman has also kept active in traditional media with films and music.
“The world needs more bridging, more love. And I was just thinking. How can you bridge through art? What we’ve done with the piano pieces, which is such a Western piece, like Clair de Lune, and and how the Kathak fuses them so naturally,” he said. “My friends in London asked med to send it and they love it. I know that it’s it’s going to work, and it has something beautiful, from an old classic piece to offer.”
I told him about the beautiful experience of Dear Van Gogh with Thatgamecompany’s Sky: Children of the Light. It’s a moving story.
“That’s beautiful,” Rahman said. “I think everybody has a purpose. I was watching the Mozart series yesterday and it was beautiful.”
I noted it is very interesting to see artists reaching out into new technologies and platforms here.
“And what’s nice about things like this is you can get away from the cliche of how commercial filmmaking is over the top. All that violence happening, where here we can do something which is very emotional, which could be because with VR, the visuals linger much more in your mind because it’s so real. It lingers for a few days. Like it used to be with even with movies, 2D movies, it used to be like that,” Rahman said. “There’s so much attack on Instagram and this and Reels and YouTube. I think the way it’s showcased in the VR in high quality in the App Vision Pro will definitely have an emotional impact on human sensibilities.”