Think I laughed out loud when they showed the table top NBA in the launch video because the exact same concept was in the launch videos for at least oculus and magic leap, maybe more headsets but it’s always been a fake concept that feels a bit like a solution in search of a problem.
Fair play to them finally making the eternal vaporware demo real.
Fascinating seeing how an Apple launch plays out when the 3rd party dev support just isn’t there and nor are the users.
I am struggling to come up with some mainstream uses for this. Sports, concerts, plays, etc are something that could theoretically be used on a recurring basis to entice the public.
My only nerd imaginations are something like a WH40k game. Watch a MOBA in 3D. Fortnite.
Maybe a few historical events? This was the moon landing configuration. The view from the grassy knoll to Kennedy.
Improbable tried baseball.[1] They have some kind of deal with the Major League Baseball company. Improbable's metaverse is so expensive to operate that they can't run it 24/7, so they only rent servers for pay per view special events.
American football would make more sense as something to view in VR. The action is complicated to follow.
The MLB VR app[1] is pretty neat. You can sit behind home plate with a virtual strike zone, track balls, launch trajectory, height, a bunch of stats as you watch the game play out in real time. Including live games.
A lot of the negative reviews are people confused it's not a game, it's to watch baseball games.
I can't say I'd watch a ton of games on it but I watched some playoff games on it.
Only complaint is that the players are just little cards running around the field. MLB has very good 3D tracking[2] of players on the field, if you could see a somewhat realistic model of players on the field that would be pretty amazing.
If they iterated on the concept I could see more people adopting it.
My wife would absolutely pay money to go to an auditorium with 100 other people to watch a live taylor swift concert. Even though its technically feasible to do it in your home, or even to watch it the next day, I know she would pay to be part of a "live" experience.
Sure, but there's a huge visceral difference between looking at a screen versus "being there" in what your brain interprets as, for example, a small black-box theater with a stage in the middle.
1) paying hundred of dollars or more, potentially having to travel to a different city to watch the actual event, where you enjoy it with friends/family and the rest of the crowd
2) watch a filmed version in the theater or Blu-ray for $10, with your family/friends and other fans
3) purchase a $3500 headset that is heavy and uncomfortable, watch a filmed version for $10-20, with yourself
The movie theater experience seems like a pretty good deal. If I am not watch the real thing, I might as well just spend $10 and get a great experience.
Theres places like https://www.cosm.com/the-experience that have a spherical view and seating right up close that do live sports and concerts that are more engaging than a normal flat screen.
I'd be interested in using it for auto racing. Usually the tracks are too large to see all at once, the cars are going by too fast to track, and in most cases both apply. Especially if you could zoom in on areas of interest as they happen.
TV OEMs tried to make 3D home entertainment a thing over a decade ago, and it was a failure. Has the environment changed enough to make a difference? I have my doubts, even though the average Internet bandwidth has gone up, at least 3D TV was nominally a shared social activity.
It's more Tha the tech improved. It's a way better feeling than any 3d projection and it's able to be interacted with.
The main issue is adoption. They aren't cheap enough that you'll simply gather a family around to play locally. At best you communicate online and experience it through peers from afar.
One of the biggest reasons 3D tv failed is the lack of socializing while using it. You were required to have glasses for each person watching which limited the ability to use in group settings.
It didn't let you socialize because you needed to keep an exact angle. There's no restriction with VR since you can portray an avatar or person. So thars mitigated.
It's more a matter that VR is expensive and still not small enough to he accessible.
DoD is soon getting its Enemy of the State wish fulfilled with pervasive targeted imaging from VLEO. Projecting that realtime imagery in 3D would be icing on the cake.
DoD won't do it with any of these consumer headsets, though, because you can't get anything wireless approved for use in a SCIF. And no, they won't even consider doing anything outside of the SCIF.
VR/AR for DoD is a dead end, unless you have a deep personal relationship with some random Air Force Colonel who is willing to personally walk all your work through all the paperwork on the promise of a board seat when he retires.
What about Microsoft's AR goggles for soldiers? DoD has been investing in that for years and through multiple iterations; iirc it's been fielded for tests and is moving steadily toward production. I saw a headline that someone else was buying it from Microsoft for billions of dollars, so it seems to be worth something.
Excellent example of neo-IBM syndrome. Soldiers have complained about IVAS being too heavy and making them sick. But nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. It's been going for years and, honestly, anyone honest with experience with Hololens predicted its demise on day one.
Anduril is the company buying IVAS. Founded by Palmer Luckey, who also founded Oculus. Unfortunately, he was never really the technical brains behind Oculus, more "the kid with hubris who got caught up in the ride." Anduril itself seems to be doing well, and I'm even considering applying, but I'm still on the fence about whether them buying IVAS is a good signal.
> Soldiers have complained about IVAS being too heavy and making them sick.
That was feedback on an earlier test and iirc those bugs were/are addressed with later versions. Of course there are going to be bugs as the product is developed.
A strategy games like baldurs gate would be amazingly immersive if selected characters were fixed to the table and the full world was rendered to the horizon
Demeo (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1484280/Demeo/) is the pure board game implementation of that concept, with a lot of effort put into actually taking advantage of the VR aspect without siloing players off from each other.
DnD with the option to switch between 3rd and 1st person views would be amazing.
Personally, I'd like an NFL game where you drop your players on the line, draw the routes on the field, and then switch to 1st person QB view for the snap.
I’m so happy to see the side effects of Apple pissing on developers for so long that large caps pull out and small business and individual developers don’t want to touch the stuff.
There was an old Oculus app where you could watch NBA games in VR, except it was from the perspective of 3D camera rigs that were set up above the backboards. The company behind this app, NextVR, was acquired by Apple in 2020. (Meta has subsequently made different arrangements for broadcasting NBA games in VR.)
I get court side view if it’s 3d footage it would be immersive. It’s the tiny players running around the coffee table that’s technically impressive but conceptually baffling why you’d want that.
I think the missing context from the post (as it calls out) is that the intended experience is that you have the diorama view at the same time as the actual footage, so it's showing you where everyone is offscreen.
When you're not "inside the action" of the live TV broadcast, you're not going to turn to a low-poly video game map because the live broadcast will give you HD wide shots better than this tabletop garbage. No one wants to swivel their head back and forth with 1.5 pounds of dork box cantilevered off their face for an experience less immersive than the live broadcast and offering zero value add.
Yeah, it seems awesome to be able to track the entire game at once instead of just focusing on what’s in camera frame. The combination of both could be very engaging.
Anyone able to explain the technical reason this doesn't exist yet? Maybe technically feasible but NBA thinks it would cannibalize tickets sales?
If it did (does?) exist it would be nice if it could be "all" courtside views (pick the one you want or switch between them as you're watching). And when I say all it doesn't have to be literally every seat, but there could be one at each baseline and then maybe one each side of the scorer's table and then 2 opposite those so 6 in total.
Yes, because no one is going to spend the money to add another 30-60 cameras to the NBA broadcast platform to cater to fewer than 100K Vision Pro users. Even Quest's 10M actives doesn't come close to warranting that kind of financial outlay.
Ok, it's totally technically feasible today, but the return is not there given the lack of viewership. If you can expand a little on the 30-60 cameras so I can understand better, is that to stitch together the various views when a AVP user moves their head? Or were you using that number to represent the number of viewpoints on the floor? Like if it was only one view at the scorer's table, do I understand you would need multiple cameras for one view?
The NBA uses 30-60 cameras to give you a truly immersive view with all of the angles in high definition. This "VR" app uses one view and a bunch of shitty animation. If the NBA was going to truly embrace the Vision Pro, they'd need to replace most of all of their stadium rigs with new gear that could feed both the live TV broadcast and the server farm crunching it for VR. Not doing so means fewer high quality angles and more "fake" bits, less dynamism, and more low-poly, laggy garbage like this demoware that, despite claiming to be immersive, simply cannot compete on immersive-ness with boring old 2D broadcasts.
You mention the 2D broadcast. Maybe my expectations are too low, but as a step in the direction of a more immersive experience, I'd love to be able to watch an NBA game, even in 2D, where the perspective is courtside and the players are "life size" based on where I'm "seated" (so obviously adjusting size based on the perspective of the camera as players come closer and move farther away just like if you were there in person). And in case I'm not being clear I mean just a stream of the game itself, not using some derivative of the game as I understand this tabletop view (which seems really dumb actually, but not sure I get it).
You sound like you know a lot about the NBA in particular so you probably know this, but the NBA has been giving that courtside perspective periodically during games on the broadcast. Being able to watch a full game that way or at least toggle between that and the broadcast at will would be great. The very few times I've sat up close at an NBA game have been mind-bogglingly better, particularly when you can feel the size and speed of the players. Maybe this VR-light 2D view I'm talking about wouldn't simulate that very well, but I think it would do a pretty good job and could be done with one extra view (still hear you that even one view courtside would require multiple cameras and is not worth the investment, but I feel like it would be sensible to offer that as a step to something even more immersive).
One of the actual compelling experiences for me on the Oculus Go back in the day was court side NBA games.
I think they did eventually offer VR live games with a few different viewing options.
It's a really nice way to watch a game. Tabletop? Meh, but the ability to control the "camera" with your head, 3d audio of the live stadium etc, that was dope.
Another AR/VR use case I don't think people even want with perfect fidelity. Time to seriously consider posibility computers/smartphones are fully mature products like washing machines and refrigerators were 40 years ago and there is no next form factor.
My first smartphone was a $50 LG Android thing in 2012. I used it to watch YouTube, check my email, listening to music, send texts, make calls, and GPS.
I use my current phone, an iPhone 13 Pro Max, to watch YouTube, check my email, listen to music, send texts, make calls, and GPS.
Obviously the newer phone is better, everything is faster, higher resolution screen, much better camera, etc...but it's not like I am doing anything with it that I wasn't doing in 2012 with my cheapy Android.
> Would you prefer to watch your sport of choice in 180-degree immersive video, or as a 2D flatscreen view with a tabletop 3D representation?
I think for people who are analyzing the game: Coaches, players, opponents, dedicated fans, historians, the tabletop view will be priceless. I also suspect that the tabletop view will become a tool in the editing room.
For casual sports fans, a much more immersive experience will probably be better.
Oddly for me, radio has been the most immersive media for live sports. Maybe because it is forced to prioritize audio…humans dance to sound not pictures.
Not to say I seek out radio or that 3d doesn’t seem cool. Only that the effects of sound penetrate me in a way that visual stimulus doesn’t.
I'm very curious what they're using on the capture side for this. How are they keying out the rest of the stadium? What's the camera setup?
I'm not a huge sports fan, so I honestly couldn't say whether I'd want to watch a game like this - but I love the concept. From a technology perspective it's great to see them trying new things.
I will say that 180° video - the other way to content in VR - makes content feel very emotionally impactful to me. If you haven't watched the Apple Immersive Video series in VR, it's very well produced and worth a watch to see the capabilities of the format.
They could be using the existing motion capture technology used for sports analytics [1]. The Australian Open did something similar this year to convert skeletal tracking data into animation to get around broadcasting rights issues [2]. I would bet small money that the Open was using the same Hawk-Eye tracking system the NBA is, because both articles mention "12 cameras and 29 tracking points in the skeleton."
I don't care so much about the tabletop view shown, but if we get to the point where I can choose my viewpoint from anywhere on the court I'd be excited. I want to pause the game and rewind and watch Jayson Tatum's jab steps up close, to get a better sense of how he fakes out the opposing player. Put me in the action.
Stadiums/arenas are using more and more cameras through out that some very cool/interesting things are coming from it. One of them is a Matrix bullet-time style ability for highlighting plays. The MLB places ads for the TV audience that the people in the stadium do not see. Same for the boards around a football pitch.
There's other tech going on specifically for sports analytics using 8K cameras that analyzes each player to give their sprint speeds, running distances, heatmap of their position on the field, etc.
All of this to say that I don't really think that placing specific cameras in the arena to provide this type of view while keying out the rest of the stadium would be that difficult. Especially if the cameras are in fixed positions where the distances/angles were well known to the court.
30-60 cameras and expert producers with years of experience broadcasting live NBA games. The NBA will NEVER upgrade their nation-wide broadcast kit, billions of dollars, for about 100K strap-on facial PC users. It's just not gonna happen.
it wouldn't need to be 30-60 cameras. so if you want to have a serious discussion, let's put down the ridiculous comments about something you clearly have no experience with.
from the demo, it's a stationary seat for a VR user. so in the VR experience, everyone will be sitting in that exact same seat. for 3D, you only need 2 lenses. for 3D VR in a 360° experience you need more, but much fewer cameras than 30-60. the best VR 3D i've worked with came from 16 cameras and a helluva lot of optical flow processing in post, but that was only on a cylinder and not a sphere. it did allow you to look 360°, and this demo doesn't need any of that. so yet again, your looking at less lenses than that. if you want to give a few degrees play in leaning left/right, you might need 4 lenses to allow for some parallax in that leaning. however, the demo clearly showed an unobstructed view of the "court" with nobody in the crowd obstructing your view. at that distant, there'd be very little parallax of the players on the court and the biggest notice would be from something in the foreground. yet, as previously stated, they've already shown that's not an issue.
as for the NBA never upgrading, you're saying that to someone that has personally worked on VR content for NBA finals. you can even see some of the camera rigs in the footage of the games. so in a sense, the NBA has already embraced VR which I guess means never has already come and gone
as for expert producers, if you've ever worked in live action VR, everyone that works in it promotes themselves (personally or as company) as experts. i started in 2014, so that's about 10 years of experience. i'm not an arrogant asshole, so i'd never call myself an expert, but i've got enough experience to qualify.
>from the demo, it's a stationary seat for a VR user. so in the VR experience, everyone will be sitting in that exact same seat.
From other videos of the app, you can see the viewer isn't bound to any specific position. It appears to track enough skeleton key-points per player in full 3d to reconstruct them as models. Maybe they are skinning them from video but it doesn't really look like it.
Unfortunately this medium has neither the atmosphere of a live event, nor the skilled camera feed cuts of a televised event (a lot of effort goes on behind the scenes to make a televised game exciting to watch).
I don't watch a lot of basketball but the "all-22" film in American football is great to watch for the hardcore fans. Seeing the whole field or court from any vantage point could give sports nerds some insight into how teams approach the game.
I feel like table top stuff isn't a good fit with the heavy weight of the apple headset when you have to tilt your head down, party from the fairly low vertical field of view.
Of course you are right. Craning your neck to swing your head back and forth following the action with 1.5 pounds of goggles cantilevered off your face, for the full game or even parts of it, is going to be very challenging.
It is not relaxing to wear any VR headset compared to watching TV. I use a web-based image viewer on my MQ3 in lean-back mode but the extended battery and UI are awkward for this.
For high energy experiences like games and fitness apps the weight is less of a problem, but Apple chose to ignore those established applications for passive entertainment where you don't want to work your micro muscles.
This seems to be very subjective. I can wear the Apple Vision Pro headset for hours without it feeling uncomfortably heavy.
I'm not sure if that's because I just happen to have a good light seal fit, or if it's because I spend a lot of time in VR on other platforms and am more used to it?
Good for a tech demo and good for making headlines, but exactly zero people are actually going to watch a game like this for more than 30 seconds. At minimum the players need to be "real", not cartoon stick figures.
The bigger problem of course is that with local/regional blackouts, nationally televised games and other broadcast restrictions there aren't very many games worth watching on NBA's own app for League Pass subscribers. And judging by how massive a media rights contract they just signed with TV networks, the status quo isn't going to change anytime soon.
I don't envy whoever has to wrangle all the random licensing contracts major sports networks have. My partner is big into fantasy and she's got players on all sorts of random teams and wanted to watch the game so I looked into it.
Me: Can I pay someone, presumably you, any price to watch any NFL game I want?
VR and Sports together certainly brings out the cynicism! Seriously tho, as with all VR/AR, this is _extremely cool_, but the practical reality is that in order to enjoy this with a group of friends we'd need ~8k in clunky heavy hardware on our heads. Cheaper to just go to an NBA game.
One could imagine this tech being used to rent out local gymnasiums with movie-theater-showing-a-3d-film style glasses so that every small town could go to an NBA game together. The blocker is making the headset cheap enough that you could have two thousand of them together in a room without the room being wealthy enough to have just flown to an actual NBA game in the first place.
Interestingly, a lot of NBA fans don't even watch NBA games anymore because it's inconvenient (time and commercials) and games have no weight. Just highlights and statlines. Except for tuning in for recent Luka appearances.
So it's adding an extra layer of inconvenience and discomfort to something that's already seen as inconvenient, and something I feel people are doing less often unless watching with others.
A VR low-poly single camera view is FAR LESS immersive than the actual NBA broadcasts which utilize 30-60 world class cameras, including wide shots like this for context (but not silly laggy stick figures.)
Even as a "second screen" I'm not going to turn my attention from the fast paced "inside the action" feel I get from the broadcast to look at this shitty game map because I'd miss the action, and when there's no action, the professional NBA producers already give me wide context shots, shots of the benches, the spectators, and more.
This experience offers zero practical value, to NBA fans or even casual sports watchers. It's yet another piece of truly worthless VR demoware.
Probably depends on how much it costs to convert it to 3d in real time. NBA is desperate for new viewers, it's been declining (often due to their own rules).
It might end up being only for watching already aired games so they can backlog it and reduce costs.
I watched few races on it and it was pretty great. You logged in with your F1TV account and could set up streams around you plus there was 3D view of the track with current positions of cars on it, you could look at car and pinch and driver view opened in pop-up window attached to car model. Couple times I noticed a car stopped on track before it was shown on main broadcast.
Sheesh people here are so negative. This is really fucking cool in my opinion. Sports leagues are suffering from declining viewership; it’s great to see them take risks and actually produce content that’s, you know, fun.
Humanity is doomed. Only some actual communist central planning could forbid this and the other thousands of "innovations" in order to drastically reduce resource consumption and maybe, just maybe make earth kinda livable in the next 50 years. Otherwise we're just doomed and if not us, the younger generation assuredly.
Honestly want to understand your viewpoint here, is your corcern the resource consumption used in producing VR headsets, this NBA application, or something more general like all computing?
Absolutely everything related to this article except the sport itself. All innovation from now on should go through a committee of scientists and randomly selected individuals to avoid such fucking stupid ""innovations"" to ever exist.
This is super interesting to me -- I would expect that this world view would object to the comparatively extreme infrastructure and capital requirements of professional sports and other in-world consumption, vs. the relatively small outlays for digital consumption.
Is it more to do with resources misallocated from something to prevent human suffering, to something comparably suffering-neutral? (a VR headset with an NBA app on it)
While I can empathize with that, I don't think those resources would be reused in solving world hunger, poverty, access to medicine, or something more directly related to alleviating suffering.
If there's a direct connection here that I'm missing (one of the engineers abandoned a medical degree to become a developer) I'm willing to at least understand that. But otherwise your idea still seems rather tenuous.
Oddly enough, you don't have an issue with the sport, which is also suffering-neutral, and actually represents a massive capital and labour waste by comparison. (Stadiums, redirected tax revenue, bloated salaries, ownership structures)
I got a free trial of an NBA app for the MQ3 which had a courtside view. It didn't work on my 20Mbps ADSL so I stayed late at the office one night to try it out. It was kinda cool but I`d say third to kicking back and watching on TV at home or at a bar with brew and bros which is second to $6 tickets to sit courtside if you wish at college games in person.
Combat sports are legitimately greatly improved by VR. Football, futbol, cricket, baseball etc all best watched on TV. I've never enjoyed sitting on the field as much as a few rows above in the stands and VR would replicate that - in the best scenario of VR.
late to the party but theres a pretty cool group of ppl working on building a library of HD, spatial, ringside combat sports. these ppl seem like real fans. theyll chat with anyone about their process and seem excited to share a project that excites them.
at a closer look i dont think they even have a website. ive only seen them on reddit and now that i search i think they pretty much only exist there. despite that, whoever runs the account is nice, knowledgeable and responsive
it makes me, a college basketball fan, want to talk to some of the local smaller schools about a similar project
Fair play to them finally making the eternal vaporware demo real.
Fascinating seeing how an Apple launch plays out when the 3rd party dev support just isn’t there and nor are the users.