Both Apple pundits and most of the internet seem to agree that Vision Pro is the best way to watch baseball, following the immersive experience offered by Apple’s Friday Night Baseball.
Notably, there also seemed to be a consensus view that less is more when it comes to the various immersive camera angles …
Macworld’s Michael Simon got the headline award with Apple finally hits the VR home run.
I’ve never had a desire to buy a Vision Pro. Even if I had $4,000 to blow at the Apple Store, I’d probably pick up a loaded MacBook Pro or a Mac mini with a Studio Display XDR instead of Apple’s cutting-edge handset. But Friday Night Baseball in Apple Immersive changed my perspective. The first-ever broadcast of a live Major League Baseball game with 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view, watching the Red Sox-Yankees game on the Vision Pro was almost as breathtaking as being at Yankee Stadium.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber was every bit as enthusiastic.
The whole thing was legit exciting. Vision Pro continues to get a bad rap because Apple hasn’t sold many of them, and isn’t going to sell many of them until they come out with new models that are cheaper and lighter and less fussy. But there’s no denying that these immersive experiences are fucking cool. And an immersive live experience adds something else. It’s ineffable. Hard to say why, but feeling like you’re at another place watching something happen live is magic. Just a few years ago it would have required literal magic. It wasn’t possible. Now it is.
Jason Snell at Six Colors was more restrained in his phrasing, but was also a fan.
In the end, it felt much more like I was sitting at Yankee Stadium watching the game.
He said one change Apple made over its basketball footage was not cutting between lots of different camera angles, and he fully approved. Others agreed with him.
Each half inning was shown from a single camera on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout. Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in the way of my view of the game itself.
Having watched a clip posted on X by Justin Ryan of Spatial Insider, this does seem to offer the best of both worlds.
As someone who thinks a far less expensive and massively lighter face monitor is a better bet for most TV and movie viewing, I can definitely see the appeal of Vision Pro for this type of fully immersive experience. I’m still waiting for my perfect compromise product.
