My Vision Pro has been getting a real workout this week while our TV is in transit; it continues to be a great media consumption device and it’s also standing in very well as a monitor for my desktop Mac. Today I spent half an hour watching the start of the Red Sox/Yankees game, presented as an immersive experience, which means it was a 180 full range of vision view.
It was good! In the pre-game they showed off cameras in each team’s dugout, in the Yankees bullpen, in the second deck behind home plate, out in right field, and looking at each team’s on deck circle. I think possibly the same cameras for the dugouts and the on deck circles, based on positioning. I was a little worried the actual game would bounce around between them all annoyingly, which has been a complaint about the immersive NBA presentations Apple experimented with earlier this year.
Once the game started, though, they settled down to showing everything from the on base circle cameras, cutting from one to the other depending on which team was at bat. Plenty of continuity. Replays and close ups of the action were presented on a virtual Jumbotron located well above the field: easy to look at, but not in the way of the action. The Jumbotron also had all the stats you might expect, which meant nobody was tempted to fiddle around with a bunch of virtual pop-ups superimposed on the players or ball. Good choice.
They also had the umpire mic’d up. I don’t watch much baseball on TV so for all I know that’s a standard feature for broadcasts these days, but it worked great with spatial audio.
I still think one of these days someone’s going to use tools like CourtVision to generate real time immersive environments which allow the viewer to control exactly where they are on the field, but I’m not sure the tech is quite where it needs to be yet. And the current state of the art for immersive sports is still very good. You could get me to resubscribe to the NBA Season Pass if the NBA version of this wasn’t limited to the hated Lakers.