Explore Immersive Press Kit

James Hustler started filming at 17, capturing divers in Thailand with whatever camera he could get his hands on. He spent three years living in a motorhome across New Zealand, filming the country's landscapes while teaching himself to code. When Apple launched Vision Pro in 2024, he built Explore POV from scratch in six weeks with no prior app development experience. Eighteen months later, Apple named it App of the Year.

Explore POV is not a 360-degree video app. It is a curated library of cinematic immersive video, shot in up to 16K resolution using the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera. Every destination is personally filmed by James, bringing a filmmaker's eye to spatial computing. The library spans beaches, mountains, forests, cities, and underwater environments across 22 countries, with new content added weekly.

The app's impact extends far beyond travel entertainment. Users with disabilities have described Explore POV as life-changing, giving them access to places they could never physically visit. People dealing with anxiety, depression, and chronic illness use it as part of their daily mental health routines. These user stories caught the attention of researchers. Today the University of Michigan is running an early-stage study into how immersive video affects wellbeing, and Oxford University is recruiting for a study on the same question.

Today, Explore POV runs on Apple Vision Pro and on Quest, Pico and Samsung Galaxy XR via the headset browser, live now at explorepov.com, bringing cinematic immersive video to far more people worldwide. The entire company, from filming to coding to post-production, remains the work of one person based in Christchurch, New Zealand.