The NBA Apple Vision Pro app now has a 3D tabletop view

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.<p>Fair play to them finally making the eternal vaporware demo real.<p>Fascinating seeing how an Apple launch plays out when the 3rd party dev support just isn’t there and nor are the users.

Another AR&#x2F;VR use case I don&#x27;t think people even want with perfect fidelity. Time to seriously consider posibility computers&#x2F;smartphones are fully mature products like washing machines and refrigerators were 40 years ago and there is no next form factor.

&gt; 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?<p>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.<p>For casual sports fans, a much more immersive experience will probably be better.

I&#x27;m very curious what they&#x27;re using on the capture side for this. How are they keying out the rest of the stadium? What&#x27;s the camera setup?<p>I&#x27;m not a huge sports fan, so I <i>honestly</i> couldn&#x27;t say whether I&#x27;d want to watch a game like this - but I love the concept. From a technology perspective it&#x27;s great to see them trying new things.<p>I will say that 180° video - the other way to content in VR - makes content feel very emotionally impactful to me. If you haven&#x27;t watched the Apple Immersive Video series in VR, it&#x27;s very well produced and worth a watch to see the capabilities of the format.

Probably I&#x27;d want better seats!<p>Unfortunately this medium has neither the atmosphere of a live event, nor the skilled camera feed cuts of a televised event (a <i>lot</i> of effort goes on behind the scenes to make a televised game exciting to watch).

I feel like table top stuff isn&#x27;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.

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 &quot;real&quot;, not cartoon stick figures.<p>The bigger problem of course is that with local&#x2F;regional blackouts, nationally televised games and other broadcast restrictions there aren&#x27;t very many games worth watching on NBA&#x27;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&#x27;t going to change anytime soon.

VR and Sports together certainly brings out the cynicism! Seriously tho, as with all VR&#x2F;AR, this is _extremely cool_, but the practical reality is that in order to enjoy this with a group of friends we&#x27;d need ~8k in clunky heavy hardware on our heads. Cheaper to <i>just go to an NBA game</i>.<p>One could <i>imagine</i> 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&#x27;t even watch NBA games anymore because it&#x27;s inconvenient (time and commercials) and games have no weight. Just highlights and statlines. Except for tuning in for recent Luka appearances.<p>So it&#x27;s adding an extra layer of inconvenience and discomfort to something that&#x27;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.)<p>Even as a &quot;second screen&quot; I&#x27;m not going to turn my attention from the fast paced &quot;inside the action&quot; feel I get from the broadcast to look at this shitty game map because I&#x27;d miss the action, and when there&#x27;s no action, the professional NBA producers already give me wide context shots, shots of the benches, the spectators, and more.<p>This experience offers zero practical value, to NBA fans or even casual sports watchers. It&#x27;s yet another piece of truly worthless VR demoware.

Wonder if you can scale the model up to fill a gymnasium? hah

How to link (or even just obtain) the gif&#x2F;video from that page?<p>It is not showing up on the &#x27;Network&#x27; tab in Chromium&#x27;s Developer tools.

Until they embrace porn this product is dead

I prefer Australia Open approach. I mean I don&#x27;t need to have thousands dollar device to get the fun of it.

Cool.<p>How many people are going to use it? How much money is this going to make?<p>I&#x27;m not putting my bets on NBA or Apple for this thing.

Do they have this for F1?

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.

cool gimmick

Oh wow, both users must be ecstatic.&#x2F;s

Nobody cares

Humanity is doomed. Only some <i>actual</i> communist central planning could forbid this and the other thousands of &quot;innovations&quot; in order to drastically reduce resource consumption and maybe, just maybe make earth kinda livable in the next 50 years. Otherwise we&#x27;re just doomed and if not us, the younger generation assuredly.

This seems like a bad product. Wouldn&#x27;t court side, full size be much better?

I don&#x27;t enjoy basketball and I think the Vision Pro is a crazy stupid product --- but this does look cool as hell.<p>Let me know when they make it work with a real sport.