FOUNDER’S NOTE I MADE IT MANDATORY.
A Founder’s Note from Dom Adams, Creator of Dual Vision™
“I hate to admit this as a filmmaker: I’m one of the first people to reach for my phone the moment a movie starts.”
The phone wasn’t
the problem.
I have to admit something that probably makes me a terrible filmmaker. I reach for my phone while I’m watching movies.
Sometimes it’s a notification. Sometimes it’s a text. Sometimes I’m looking something up because the movie reminded me of something. And sometimes, honestly, I’m just scrolling.
I’m not alone.
You’ve probably seen the statistic: 87% of people reach for their phone while watching a movie or show.
Whatever the exact figure, the behavior itself isn’t up for debate. The second screen is now a permanent fixture of how people watch.
And the entertainment industry is still trying to make it go away.
Streamers, broadcasters, and platforms have spent years fighting to keep audiences’ undivided attention. Notifications are distractions. Phones are distractions. Second screens are distractions.
As a filmmaker, I believed that too.
What if the phone
isn’t the enemy?
That question
became Dual Vision™.
Second-screen experiences aren’t new.
Trivia. Polls. Behind-the-scenes clips. Cast interviews. Social feeds. All of these things can live beside a movie or show.
But they’re optional.
The primary story still works perfectly without them.
What if the story itself was split across two devices? What if the television carried one half of the narrative, and my phone carried the other — and I needed BOTH to understand the whole thing?
That single shift changed the way I thought about the relationship between the two screens.
They stop competing for my attention.
They become two halves of the same experience.
One Half of the Story
Television / Computer / Tablet
The Other Half of the Story
Phone / Tablet
The Idea.
Actually Working.
This is Dual Vision™ in action — two synchronized devices delivering two required parts of the same story.
A second essential screen
changes what I can do.
This is the part that excites me most as a filmmaker.
A second, essential screen gives me tools I’ve never had before. Not another place to put advertisements. Not another place to display trivia.
A place to tell story.
A thriller could show the phone something the television character doesn’t know.
A mystery could reveal information on the phone that completely changes the meaning of what is happening on the main screen.
A drama could allow the audience to experience two perspectives simultaneously.
Two synchronized screens let me think differently about narrative.
Instead of asking people to put their phones down, I started asking a better question:
What can I put on those phones that actually makes the story better?
Parallel Narratives
Two simultaneous streams can reveal different information while remaining part of one story.
Hidden Timelines
Events can unfold across different temporal layers, connected through synchronization.
Unreliable Narrators
Each screen can expose information that challenges what the audience thinks it knows.
Two Perspectives
The same moment can be experienced through two synchronized points of view.
The idea only matters
if the engineering works.
Here’s the part that took far longer to solve than any script ever has.
An idea like this is worthless if the engineering behind it can’t keep two independent playback environments synchronized while responding to real-world network conditions and device differences.
So I built a full synchronization architecture, filed as a provisional patent on July 11, 2026, engineered around a few core problems:
Device Pairing & Session Handshake
Devices establish a shared session so the primary screen and secondary screen know they belong to the same viewing experience.
Timecode-Locked Synchronization
Independent media streams are continuously aligned against the shared session state.
Adaptive Latency Compensation
The system accounts for network and device timing differences without requiring the viewer to manually correct playback.
State-Aware Narrative Triggers
Narrative events can respond to the shared playback state, allowing the two streams to behave as one system.
Fault Tolerance & Graceful Degradation
The experience is designed to handle device or connection interruptions without unnecessarily destroying the viewing session.
Invisible Complexity
The viewer should never have to think about the engineering. The two screens should simply feel like one experience.
The viewer should only ever experience two screens that feel like one.
Not bonus content.
A different way to tell a story.
Every title can still work the traditional way.
But switch on the Dual Vision experience and the relationship between the two screens changes completely.
The phone isn’t displaying something that happens to be related to the movie.
It is part of the movie.
That distinction matters to me.
Dual Vision isn’t bonus content sitting next to a movie. It’s a format I designed to make the two screens part of the story from the very first draft of the script.
What if existing stories
could live again?
I also see another possibility: existing library titles don’t have to stay static.
A film or series could be reintroduced with an entirely new Dual Vision experience — giving audiences a reason to revisit something they may have already watched.
The original title remains intact. The Dual Vision experience creates another way to experience it.
And then there’s live sports.
Applied to live sports, I can imagine viewers watching the game on their television while a second, essential layer of the experience plays out in real time on their phone.
I stopped fighting
the second screen.
For years I’ve been told that my phone is ruining my attention span, that the second screen is the reason nobody’s really watching anymore.
I think the real problem is simpler: the industry has never given the second screen anything meaningful to do.
The phone is already in your hand. People are already looking at it. That behavior isn’t going away, no matter how many “please silence your notifications” messages I put before the opening credits.
So I stopped fighting it.
I don’t want Dual Vision to give audiences one more thing to glance at. I want it to give them the other half of the story — something that matters to the experience instead of pulling against it.