There haven't been any extensive use reports of the Apple Vision Pro, but most of the people who had a brief introduction walked away impressed giving a sense that this really is something new. It's spendy by many measures, but supplies will apparently be heavily constrained as some components are both expensive and very low yield. But with its visual and sound field reconstruction capabilities, one set of use cases may involve real-time remote presence. A court-side seat at a NBA game or something from a Taylor Swift concert come to mind.
But there are questions. Horace is one of the best Apple analysts out there as well as an all-around really smart guy. (If you're interested in tech or micromobility, you need to follow his podcasts, posts and live events.) He recently posted some thoughts on the value of remote presence and how it might be one of the drivers for Apple's new device. I would be really surprised if folks at Apple aren't thinking along these lines.
I sent a note to him that offered a little pushback that wasn't really pushback.. it's more that value of being there varies a lot and the same for quality of experience. Sports and music are two very interesting cases.
Last night an indoor women's volleyball match between Nebraska and Oklahoma set the attendance record for any women's sporting event. Normally NCAA games are held indoors in places that rarely seat more than 8,000. High school and college women's volleyball has the greatest participation of any women's team sport in the US. This wasn't an important match - Nebraska has a much higher ranking than Oklahoma and it's preseason, but it's an event. There's a strong passion is that part of the country - one of you is well aware of it.1 So 92,003 paying fans filled more than the seats.. about 10,000 had to stand as the football stadium was too small. The view of action was probably terrible for most of the fans, but that wasn't the point. All of those people in the same place sharing the same passion and seeing it roll out at the same time.
Here's the walkout video for a sense of scale
I'm a beach volleyball fan and regularly find myself waking up at two or three in the morning to follow a match with a player I know or a team I care about on the other side planet. The streaming is sometimes poor and costs $80 a year. Tickets aren't terribly expensive, but travel is so I haven't been to a large number of events. The sport is extremely friendly, probably because there isn't much money in it, and talking to players and other spectators is at least half of it.. going to dinner with a couple of gold medalists isn't exactly an everyday event. I wanted to go to Tokyo and had been invited as a friend of a Canadian team, but Covid. Perhaps Paris.
The BBC had a nice piece on why people care about games. It's a short and worthwhile listen.
So would I use an Apple Vision Pro if a steam that offered a court side view with good commentary existed? Sure! Well - maybe. How much would I pay? That's an interesting question. It would largely rest on how much the streaming experience was improved. It can't replace the physical experience of being part of an event. It's interesting that American soccer (football to the rest of the world) sometimes go to bars to find a critical mass of likeminded fans when their team is playing. And there are Super Bowl parties. For a couple of hours what people do for a living, religion, political views and so on don't matter. There's a distributed group bonding. Do products like the Apple Vision Pro augment or replace that form of interaction? I don't think so, but I don't have a working crystal ball.
And there's music. These days it mostly falls into live streaming, on demand streaming, in person concerts and a small (but growing again) amount of collecting physical media. The streaming experiences aren't great, but they're cheap with large (for popular genres) catalogs.2 I prefer small live music events. Not only do the musicians connect with each other and the audience, but the audience often connects with the musicians and that can be magical. Depending on the event the interactions within the audience can be important.. Taylor Swift concerts are a prime example, but many other musicians have similar or better "magic", albeit at a smaller scale. (I'd offer Yo-Yo Ma as an example).
There's a scale for each person and each event on the importance of various aspects of these different takes on interaction and consumption. Radio and then television changed the values as did the expansion and, in some cases, contraction of live events. Streaming has made a difference, but it has so many rough edges. I suspect Apple's new product may offer something very different that will once again bring some change, but probably not for some time. I'm guessing we'll have a better idea around the time Apple Vision Pro 3 or 4 is announced, You'll know it when you can get NBA games through Apple Vision Pro + service for $20 a month:-)
But if anyone wants my reaction next Spring, just buy one for me and I'll review it:-)
__________
1 Nebraska had two legendary players in the 2000 → 2010 era. Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan. Here's Sarah's college record and when her number was retired. Both of them went on to illustrious indoor careers overseas and Jordan has been a key player on the US Olympic Team. Sarah eventually switched to beach volleyball has had many honors including world champion and two time Olympian. One of Sarah's awards was the Honda Cup in 2007 - the best college female athlete in any sport that year. Shortly before the Tokyo Olympics the organization that presented the award interviewed her as part of their podcast series.
2 In 1994 two of us probably hold the first time record for streaming non-trivial, live music at reasonable quality over the Internet. A Utah Phillips concert from the Folk Project in New Jersey at 96 kbps stereo by bonded ISDN lines to a hub in Princeton where it went to the Net where a few people with AAC players could listen. So I guess I'm familiar with streaming. It was good, though (for those of you who get the reference:-)
Comments