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Apple Vision Pro may have VR Apple TV+ content at launch

38 points by alwillis 3y ago

bb88 3y ago
Rumor score: Unlikely.
teeray 3y ago
I would think putting the viewer in the director’s chair would be a little weird. Like, is anyone going to choose to focus on the actors’ sock choices while there’s dialog happening? Are they now going to have to be concerned with their sock choices? I think the way we tell stories themselves would have to change for VR TV to make sense.
- Hatrix 3y ago
  360 videos are fun. The put you right inside the scene face-to-face with the actors. More experience than story telling.
- MBCook 3y ago
  It basically means throwing out all the rules of television and going back to stage plays doesn’t it? The audience can look anywhere at any time so you have to be prepared for that. You can’t use the framing of the picture to control with the audience sees or avoid dressing parts of the set because they’ll be ‘off screen’.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Like, is anyone going to choose to focus on the actors’ sock choices while there’s dialog happening? Sometimes, absolutely. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24025304_Points_of_view_Where_do_we_look_when_we_watch_TV https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24025304_Points_of_... "An exploratory eyetracker study with a custom-designed show indicated a very strong center-of-screen bias with gaze points following a roughly normal distribution peaked near screen center. Examining the show across time revealed that people were rarely all looking at the same location, and the amount of gaze dispersion within frames was highly variable."
- FemmeAndroid 3y ago
  I enjoy going to plays in past because I can control where I’m looking. Often, I want to look at something minor in a scene, as I listen to it play out and watch the action from the periphery.
bitcurious 3y ago
I’m very excited about high fidelity VR entertainment. A documentary about insects at the scale of insects, looking around at grass or car sized grasshoppers, or giant mushrooms! It’s going to be amazing. Great for theater, ballet, sports, anything else where the real world equivalent has you looking around.
- MBCook 3y ago
  I think that would be great, but my concern is bitrate. When I’ve seen 3-D videos demoed on a Quest they were kind of interesting but the macro-block video artifacts were quite noticeable. You need to show two very high resolution images at (ideally) a high frame rate. That leads to massive file sizes.
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    We thought the same thing about 1080p video back in the day.
  - wincy 3y ago
    With gigabit Internet you can stream very high quality VR content that looks really good. You just have to pay to actually get the good quality VR, or download it. I’d imagine it’s mostly expensive to the servers more so than a technical limitation. YouTube would go under if they were streaming 60GB vr videos to every person.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      Sure it’s no issue with gigabit. But there are a TON of people in the US who might not be able to get a fast enough connection for high quality streaming.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      YouTube runs one of, if not, the best CDNs in the world. The World Cup doesn't phase them. Doing that kind of bandwidth regularly instead of for a special event just means they'll be buying more hardware sooner, rather than later.
MBCook 3y ago
Apple has been shooting all shows in 180° 3D since the beginning? And editing for that? And doing the special effects? And set dressing for those areas not on screen? And no actor or director or crew member ever leaked it? Or they didn’t notice despite the incredibly obvious camera pictured in the article? No way at all. Also, what’s the point? The entire job of the director and film crew is making sure the audience sees what they need. So now I can watch Ted Lasso and choose to look at scenery the entire time that was purposefully cropped out? Come on. If you’re going to make up rumors do a better job. That camera may very well be real and the thing they used to film the demo videos they showed people. But it hasn’t been filming all Apple TV+ shows for years. I’ll eat my hat.
- threeseed 3y ago
  They didn't say Apple was definitely shooting all shows since the beginning. It's quite possible it only started recently and this is now the start of the leaks.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    That’s not the impression I get from the sentence in the embedded tweet. It didn’t say Apple had started.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > The entire job of the director and film crew is making sure the audience sees what they need. So now I can watch Ted Lasso and choose to look at scenery the entire time that was purposefully cropped out? This is precisely the reason why narrative storytelling cannot work in VR (other than a simulated movie theater). The reason is that a TV show or movie presents a point of view by its creator and you, the observer, isn't meant to interact with a story whose plot you cannot influence.
  - ativzzz 3y ago
    It certainly can work in VR - it just has to be done differently. Everything that's viewable in a scene should be interesting in some way. Something similar to Sleep No More[0] - it's some modernist Shakespeare's Macbeth but the cool part is it's in a giant multi-story venue where all the spectators walk around and watch parts of the play they want as they happen throughout the hotel. The environment is great and is a joy to just browse around. This is what VR needs to do. This is obviously very time consuming and expensive to create so much interesting content -and the storytelling has to be different than what we're used to [0] https://mckittrickhotel.com/sleep-no-more/#/ https://mckittrickhotel.com/sleep-no-more/#/
cowsup 3y ago
This strikes me as the shift from 4:3 to 16:9 for shows like The Simpsons. Do we gain any extra gags or notable content by seeing a cartoon in widescreen? No, not really. But if we have a widescreen TV anyway, it's nice to fill it up with content. I don't think TV+ content needs to be filmed in 180 degrees, any more than we need to see Springfield in 16:9. But I think Apple wants to give the people dropping $3,500 on their hardware a premium experience, so filming some shows like that will help them feel more immersive.
threeseed 3y ago
This looks to be capturing Spatial Video similar to how the Vision Pro does it. And from people who've used it it's not a full 3D effect where you can fully move your head and see around the scene. Rather it's more like a stereoscopic 2.5D effect where it adds subtle depth to make everything seem more life-like and present but is fundamentally still a fixed 2D derived scene. That way there is no change to how the content is made. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/06/vision-pro-3d-videos-photos/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/06/vision-pro-3d-videos-ph...
perryizgr8 3y ago
It's strange how Apple seems to have thrown so much hardware and software at the problem and still the best they can do is represent 2D windows in 3D space. They hardly showed anything that was truly 3D. Even the camera here looks like a standard stereoscopic setup. Basically two 2D windows superimposed on one another.
- theklr 3y ago
  Cause every VR team has attempted before them with marginal success. 3D in 2D formats has never been appealing for mass consumption. The goal is to get people comfortable with the idea of this first.
- isykt 3y ago
  Why is that strange? Is there someone currently doing it better?

38 points by alwillis 3y ago

bb88 3y ago

Rumor score: Unlikely.

I would think putting the viewer in the director’s chair would be a little weird. Like, is anyone going to choose to focus on the actors’ sock choices while there’s dialog happening? Are they now going to have to be concerned with their sock choices? I think the way we tell stories themselves would have to change for VR TV to make sense.

Hatrix 3y ago
360 videos are fun. The put you right inside the scene face-to-face with the actors. More experience than story telling.
MBCook 3y ago
It basically means throwing out all the rules of television and going back to stage plays doesn’t it? The audience can look anywhere at any time so you have to be prepared for that. You can’t use the framing of the picture to control with the audience sees or avoid dressing parts of the set because they’ll be ‘off screen’.
CharlesW 3y ago
> Like, is anyone going to choose to focus on the actors’ sock choices while there’s dialog happening? Sometimes, absolutely. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24025304_Points_of_view_Where_do_we_look_when_we_watch_TV https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24025304_Points_of_... "An exploratory eyetracker study with a custom-designed show indicated a very strong center-of-screen bias with gaze points following a roughly normal distribution peaked near screen center. Examining the show across time revealed that people were rarely all looking at the same location, and the amount of gaze dispersion within frames was highly variable."
FemmeAndroid 3y ago
I enjoy going to plays in past because I can control where I’m looking. Often, I want to look at something minor in a scene, as I listen to it play out and watch the action from the periphery.

bitcurious 3y ago

I’m very excited about high fidelity VR entertainment. A documentary about insects at the scale of insects, looking around at grass or car sized grasshoppers, or giant mushrooms! It’s going to be amazing. Great for theater, ballet, sports, anything else where the real world equivalent has you looking around.

MBCook 3y ago
I think that would be great, but my concern is bitrate. When I’ve seen 3-D videos demoed on a Quest they were kind of interesting but the macro-block video artifacts were quite noticeable. You need to show two very high resolution images at (ideally) a high frame rate. That leads to massive file sizes.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  We thought the same thing about 1080p video back in the day.
- wincy 3y ago
  With gigabit Internet you can stream very high quality VR content that looks really good. You just have to pay to actually get the good quality VR, or download it. I’d imagine it’s mostly expensive to the servers more so than a technical limitation. YouTube would go under if they were streaming 60GB vr videos to every person.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Sure it’s no issue with gigabit. But there are a TON of people in the US who might not be able to get a fast enough connection for high quality streaming.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    YouTube runs one of, if not, the best CDNs in the world. The World Cup doesn't phase them. Doing that kind of bandwidth regularly instead of for a special event just means they'll be buying more hardware sooner, rather than later.

MBCook 3y ago

Apple has been shooting all shows in 180° 3D since the beginning? And editing for that? And doing the special effects? And set dressing for those areas not on screen? And no actor or director or crew member ever leaked it? Or they didn’t notice despite the incredibly obvious camera pictured in the article? No way at all. Also, what’s the point? The entire job of the director and film crew is making sure the audience sees what they need. So now I can watch Ted Lasso and choose to look at scenery the entire time that was purposefully cropped out? Come on. If you’re going to make up rumors do a better job. That camera may very well be real and the thing they used to film the demo videos they showed people. But it hasn’t been filming all Apple TV+ shows for years. I’ll eat my hat.

threeseed 3y ago
They didn't say Apple was definitely shooting all shows since the beginning. It's quite possible it only started recently and this is now the start of the leaks.
- MBCook 3y ago
  That’s not the impression I get from the sentence in the embedded tweet. It didn’t say Apple had started.
andsoitis 3y ago
> The entire job of the director and film crew is making sure the audience sees what they need. So now I can watch Ted Lasso and choose to look at scenery the entire time that was purposefully cropped out? This is precisely the reason why narrative storytelling cannot work in VR (other than a simulated movie theater). The reason is that a TV show or movie presents a point of view by its creator and you, the observer, isn't meant to interact with a story whose plot you cannot influence.
- ativzzz 3y ago
  It certainly can work in VR - it just has to be done differently. Everything that's viewable in a scene should be interesting in some way. Something similar to Sleep No More[0] - it's some modernist Shakespeare's Macbeth but the cool part is it's in a giant multi-story venue where all the spectators walk around and watch parts of the play they want as they happen throughout the hotel. The environment is great and is a joy to just browse around. This is what VR needs to do. This is obviously very time consuming and expensive to create so much interesting content -and the storytelling has to be different than what we're used to [0] https://mckittrickhotel.com/sleep-no-more/#/ https://mckittrickhotel.com/sleep-no-more/#/

cowsup 3y ago

This strikes me as the shift from 4:3 to 16:9 for shows like The Simpsons. Do we gain any extra gags or notable content by seeing a cartoon in widescreen? No, not really. But if we have a widescreen TV anyway, it's nice to fill it up with content. I don't think TV+ content needs to be filmed in 180 degrees, any more than we need to see Springfield in 16:9. But I think Apple wants to give the people dropping $3,500 on their hardware a premium experience, so filming some shows like that will help them feel more immersive.

threeseed 3y ago

This looks to be capturing Spatial Video similar to how the Vision Pro does it. And from people who've used it it's not a full 3D effect where you can fully move your head and see around the scene. Rather it's more like a stereoscopic 2.5D effect where it adds subtle depth to make everything seem more life-like and present but is fundamentally still a fixed 2D derived scene. That way there is no change to how the content is made. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/06/vision-pro-3d-videos-photos/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/06/vision-pro-3d-videos-ph...

perryizgr8 3y ago

It's strange how Apple seems to have thrown so much hardware and software at the problem and still the best they can do is represent 2D windows in 3D space. They hardly showed anything that was truly 3D. Even the camera here looks like a standard stereoscopic setup. Basically two 2D windows superimposed on one another.

theklr 3y ago
Cause every VR team has attempted before them with marginal success. 3D in 2D formats has never been appealing for mass consumption. The goal is to get people comfortable with the idea of this first.
isykt 3y ago
Why is that strange? Is there someone currently doing it better?