YouTube brings your favorite creators and content to Apple Vision Pro. Scale any video to the size of your wall—or watch alongside other apps in your space. And the Spatial tab is full of cutting-edge spatialized, 180-degree, and 360-degree videos from filmmakers pushing the boundaries of immersive entertainment.

To learn how YouTube was redesigned for spatial computing—and why it has the potential to usher in new creative opportunities—we chatted with two members of the team: Mario Anima, a senior product manager, and Brendan Polley, a senior UX designer.

Of the many screen sizes that YouTube supports—smartphone, tablet, desktop computer, TV—few are as open-ended as Apple Vision Pro, where viewers have much more control over scale and placement.

“What’s unique is you are no longer limited by the hardware of these physical objects,” Polley says. “You can put whatever you want, wherever you want.”

That flexibility, as freeing as it is for users, poses its own set of design challenges: “We’ve only been building for windows and screens for the last 50 years,” Polley says. “Rather than just responding to different screen sizes, we needed something that responds to different spaces, volumes, and use cases.”

Enter what the team calls responsive postures—all the ways a user may approach YouTube in the flow of spatial computing.

“A lot of decisions we made serve the purpose of making a seamless, continuous experience for whatever posture you’re in,” Anima says.

“Maybe you want YouTube up while you’re doing something,” Polley says. “The app is a support character in these quick, transient interactions, so you just need it in a single window running next to other things.”

With Apple Vision Pro, the team also had to think bigger. “YouTube can fill the place the user is in—be the space itself,” Polley says.

To accommodate all those uses, the team “took things down to the ground floor,” Polley says. “We built an entirely new design system that isolated core elements—comments, the play button, ‘like’ and ‘dislike’—to fit any layout. We can support users who want to multitask and keep YouTube nice and compact, and we can support users who want large home-theater experiences.”

YouTube for Apple Vision Pro is also a major win for creators. Now, anyone can produce and publish a film to be viewed on a cinematic scale.

“Creators who have traditionally worked in 2D can stretch their creativity,” says Anima, adding that this includes YouTube Shorts, the bite-size video format built for mobile devices. “Although born out of smartphones and 2D surfaces, YouTube Shorts feel really, really immersive in spatial computing.”

And with the app’s support for 180-degree and 360-degree video, there’s more opportunity for innovation: “Those who are focusing on immersive stories, we’re going to give you a home,” Anima says. “We’re going to promote and highlight your content on the Spatial tab to give a stage to more storytellers like that.”

Whatever the format, there’s no denying the value a native YouTube experience can have, Anima says. “There’s a degree of magic that comes from watching content in these spaces.”