More Than Just Code podcast - iOS, visionOS and Swift development, news and advice · Tim Mitra, Jaime Lopez Jr, Mark Rubin

Cosmo Scharf

·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

Mindshow let people embody “an alien, a piece of kale, humans” inside a VR scene.

1. More Than Just Code podcast: Cosmo Scharf, Vision Pro, XR, and the move from film production to spatial computing. 2. Tim Mitra hosts from Toronto, Ontario, and Cosmo Scharf joins from New York City as a Vision Pro user, developer, designer, and XR veteran. 3. The episode asks how a film production background led Cosmo into VRLA, Mindshow, and Apple Vision Pro. 4. Cosmo says he discovered YouTube in middle school in 2007 and started making stop-motion videos with Felipe and short films with friends. 5. He names USC film production as the place where his interest in technology, filmmaking, and storytelling came together. 6. He describes using iMovie, Final Cut, Premiere Pro, and After Effects while experimenting with visual effects in high school. 7. Cosmo says his first VR work at USC was VRLA, a meetup group for VR people. 8. He says he then started Mindshow, which used a game engine to help people tell stories in VR headsets. 9. He explains that Mindshow began in 2014, around the first Vive, when 360 video was still early and limited. 10. He says the app let users embody characters in first person, including an alien, a piece of kale, a human, and a Twinkie snack cake. 11. Cosmo notes that hand-tracked controllers and inverse kinematics turned the headset, controllers, and gaming PC into a 3D animation studio. 12. He says users could record themselves as multiple characters, then export the result as a video for editing. 13. Cosmo says Mindshow later pivoted around 2017–2018 because monetization was difficult. 14. He says the company shifted from a public app to a private professional animation studio for client work. 15. Cosmo describes VRLA growing from a Reddit post into events hosted at Digital Domain and later at a large convention space in Los Angeles. 16. He says the community grew with the 2014 to 2018 VR hype cycle and included workshops, presentations, panels, and major tech companies. 17. The tone is conversational, technical, and reflective, with Tim often grounding Cosmo’s answers in Apple history and his own device use. 18. The format is a long-form interview that moves from personal origin story to product design, business model, and hardware comparisons. 19. People interested in Vision Pro, VR history, and creator tools will likely get the most from it. 20. People seeking a short news recap or a non-technical show may skip it.

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