I have been taking more spatial photos and videos on my phone. The reason is simple: I enjoy looking at them later in a headset and feeling a little closer to the original moment. That may sound sentimental, but it works for me.
A conventional photograph already does a remarkable job of carrying memory. Stereo adds another cue. A person or object occupies a little more of a space rather than only a position within a rectangle. The effect does not need to be dramatic to change how I respond to an ordinary scene.
That has made me want to capture more of the moments that otherwise pass by. I am less interested in whether a scene demonstrates the format impressively than in whether I will care about returning to it. A quiet, familiar moment can have more value than a technically ambitious shot of something I will forget.
There are limits to what the format preserves. A stereo pair records two viewpoints, not a complete volume that can be explored from every direction. Moving my head does not reveal everything that was outside the cameras' view. Remembering that helps separate the emotional effect from the geometry.
It also affects composition. Nearby objects can create strong depth, but strong depth is not automatically comfortable. A foreground edge that feels harmless on a phone can become more intrusive when each eye sees a different part of it. A stable, understandable scene gives the viewer more room to look around within the image.
The headset itself remains part of the experience. I would love a substantially lighter Vision Pro. The appeal of revisiting a moment does not make the weight disappear. A memory format becomes more useful when the device used to view it is convenient enough to pick up casually.
I am also interested in converting older pictures into stereoscopic views. That can be enjoyable, but it is a different process. Estimated depth adds an interpretation to an existing photograph; it does not recover a second camera observation that was never captured. Both can be worthwhile without pretending they preserve the same evidence.
For the moment, I am taking more pictures and clips with this later viewing in mind. The goal is not to document everything. It is to keep a few more ordinary moments in a form that makes me want to return to them.