7 ms·

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

133 points by matheussampaio 2y ago

wetpaws 2y ago
Nobody cares
- mouse_ 2y ago
  Got your attention tho
  - wetpaws 2y ago
    [dead]
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
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.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  It feels to me like it's one step closer to having an arbitrarily positioned "courtside seat" view.
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    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.
    - crooked-v 2y ago
      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.
      - bitmasher9 2y ago
        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.
      - asadotzler 2y ago
        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.
  - harmmonica 2y ago
    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.
    - asadotzler 2y ago
      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.
      - harmmonica 2y ago
        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?
        asadotzler 2y ago
        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.
  - ninju 2y ago
    You can currently remote viewing sporting events https://tech.cosm.com/markets/sports-and-entertainment https://tech.cosm.com/markets/sports-and-entertainment
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  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.
  - lbourdages 2y ago
    I would love this when playing DnD. You could even have the app recognize dice and compute modifiers for attack rolls and what not.
    - ortusdux 2y ago
      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.
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        https://www.meta.com/experiences/nfl-pro-era/4193975210678121/?srsltid=AfmBOorLbIeENFPEEZ4r_yNJOcsS1yJhjXvKatLcYy_26NIVzacl3njE https://www.meta.com/experiences/nfl-pro-era/419397521067812... NFL Pro Era for MQ3 sent chills up my spine when I first walked out into the arena.
    - crooked-v 2y ago
      Demeo (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1484280/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.
  - skyyler 2y ago
    >My only nerd imaginations are something like a WH40k game Okay, actually, wargaming in VR would be sick if executed well...
- cco 2y ago
  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.
- philwelch 2y ago
  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.)
- andrewmcwatters 2y ago
  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.
Keyframe 2y ago
cool gimmick
cma 2y ago
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.
- tjohns 2y ago
  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?
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Depends also on how you sit. If you've got straight posture sitting in an office chair the weight of the headset is not cantilevered. If it is the end of the day and you want to splay out on the couch and watch TV or play games it's a different thing entirely.
    - cma 2y ago
      To watch a mini NBA game on your coffee table you aren't splayed on the couch leaning back.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  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.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  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.
tantalor 2y ago
This seems like a bad product. Wouldn't court side, full size be much better?
- itishappy 2y ago
  Of course the real thing is better, but is that really an argument against broadcasts?
  - graypegg 2y ago
    I think they're talking about a VR POV that's courtside more like a normal VR experience, rather than this perspective "above" the stadium
    - itishappy 2y ago
      Oh. Fair concern, but it does that too. > Tabletop shows in addition to the 2D livestream view you see floating in front of you as a large virtual screen, giving you the benefits of both.
      - tantalor 2y ago
        No, I don't want a big 2d screen... I just want the virtual court side experience.
        itishappy 2y ago
        Oh, then I'm just dumb. Thanks for explaining!
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  who not both?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  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.
mentos 2y ago
Wonder if you can scale the model up to fill a gymnasium? hah
mathfailure 2y ago
How to link (or even just obtain) the gif/video from that page? It is not showing up on the 'Network' tab in Chromium's Developer tools.
- finnless 2y ago
  https://www.uploadvr.com/content/media/2025/02/NBA-Apple-Vision-Pro-Tabletop-view.mp4 https://www.uploadvr.com/content/media/2025/02/NBA-Apple-Vis...
paxys 2y ago
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.
- Spivak 2y ago
  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? NFL: no.
wkirby 2y ago
I don't enjoy basketball and I think the Vision Pro is a crazy stupid product --- but this does look cool as hell. Let me know when they make it work with a real sport.
- ugh123 2y ago
  What's a real sport?
  - wkirby 2y ago
    Pod racing.
  - recursive 2y ago
    Snooker
  - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
    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.
    - boogieknite 2y ago
      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. called Vantage: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vantage-official/id6698850979 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vantage-official/id6698850979 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
  - syndicatedjelly 2y ago
medlazik 2y ago
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.
- graypegg 2y ago
  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?
  - medlazik 2y ago
    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.
    - graypegg 2y ago
      I thought it seemed neat. If I was part of your randomly selected individuals, I would give it the green light. I think the core element of human creativity might be lost in your imagined system of governance.
      - medlazik 2y ago
        "Earth is burning and 99% of humanity is suffering but at least for a century we were oh so creative" You in 2062, most probably
        graypegg 2y ago
        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)
tjohns 2y ago
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.
- dylan604 2y ago
  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.
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    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.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      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.
gwbas1c 2y ago
> 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.
- brudgers 2y ago
  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.
  - j_bum 2y ago
    I have aphantasia… so audio sports broadcasts are awful for me. Radio sports sound like a long string of facts that I need to remember but can get overwhelmed with. I’m jealous that radio is immersive for you!
  - walthamstow 2y ago
    Cricket on the radio is absolute bliss, I'm sure Americans feel the same about baseball.
daft_pink 2y ago
Do they have this for F1?
- terramex 2y ago
  There was unofficial Lapz app ( https://www.lapz.io https://www.lapz.io ) on TestFlight but got taken down after complaint from F1: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301420/apple-vision-pro-viral-lapz-app-f1-complaint https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301420/apple-vision-pr... 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.
somewhereoutth 2y ago
Probably I'd want better seats! 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).
- williamcotton 2y ago
  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.
fullshark 2y ago
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.
- tombert 2y ago
  They've been mature for awhile. 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.
asadotzler 2y ago
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.
erulabs 2y ago
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.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Well the more serious problem is that a suitable 3D 360 camera for the Vision Pro doesn’t actually exist yet. And even the few 3D 180 cameras are extremely bulky, expensive, and not even taking full advantage of every pixel.
zombiwoof 2y ago
Until they embrace porn this product is dead
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
gigel82 2y ago
Oh wow, both users must be ecstatic./s
zakki 2y ago
I prefer Australia Open approach. I mean I don't need to have thousands dollar device to get the fun of it.
rs186 2y ago
Cool. How many people are going to use it? How much money is this going to make? I'm not putting my bets on NBA or Apple for this thing.
- dmix 2y ago
  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.
garrisswimmer 2y ago
[dead]
ngokevin 2y ago
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.
syndicatedjelly 2y ago
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.

Nobody cares

mouse_ 2y ago
Got your attention tho
- wetpaws 2y ago
  [dead]

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.

crooked-v 2y ago
It feels to me like it's one step closer to having an arbitrarily positioned "courtside seat" view.
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  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.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    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.
    - bitmasher9 2y ago
      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.
    - asadotzler 2y ago
      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.
- harmmonica 2y ago
  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.
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    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.
    - harmmonica 2y ago
      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?
      - asadotzler 2y ago
        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.
- ninju 2y ago
  You can currently remote viewing sporting events https://tech.cosm.com/markets/sports-and-entertainment https://tech.cosm.com/markets/sports-and-entertainment
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
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.
- lbourdages 2y ago
  I would love this when playing DnD. You could even have the app recognize dice and compute modifiers for attack rolls and what not.
  - ortusdux 2y ago
    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.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      https://www.meta.com/experiences/nfl-pro-era/4193975210678121/?srsltid=AfmBOorLbIeENFPEEZ4r_yNJOcsS1yJhjXvKatLcYy_26NIVzacl3njE https://www.meta.com/experiences/nfl-pro-era/419397521067812... NFL Pro Era for MQ3 sent chills up my spine when I first walked out into the arena.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    Demeo (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1484280/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.
- skyyler 2y ago
  >My only nerd imaginations are something like a WH40k game Okay, actually, wargaming in VR would be sick if executed well...
cco 2y ago
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.
philwelch 2y ago
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.)
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
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.

Keyframe 2y ago

cool gimmick

cma 2y ago

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.

tjohns 2y ago
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?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Depends also on how you sit. If you've got straight posture sitting in an office chair the weight of the headset is not cantilevered. If it is the end of the day and you want to splay out on the couch and watch TV or play games it's a different thing entirely.
  - cma 2y ago
    To watch a mini NBA game on your coffee table you aren't splayed on the couch leaning back.
PaulHoule 2y ago
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.
asadotzler 2y ago
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.

tantalor 2y ago

This seems like a bad product. Wouldn't court side, full size be much better?

itishappy 2y ago
Of course the real thing is better, but is that really an argument against broadcasts?
- graypegg 2y ago
  I think they're talking about a VR POV that's courtside more like a normal VR experience, rather than this perspective "above" the stadium
  - itishappy 2y ago
    Oh. Fair concern, but it does that too. > Tabletop shows in addition to the 2D livestream view you see floating in front of you as a large virtual screen, giving you the benefits of both.
    - tantalor 2y ago
      No, I don't want a big 2d screen... I just want the virtual court side experience.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        Oh, then I'm just dumb. Thanks for explaining!
nickthegreek 2y ago
who not both?
PaulHoule 2y ago
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.

mentos 2y ago

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

mathfailure 2y ago

How to link (or even just obtain) the gif/video from that page? It is not showing up on the 'Network' tab in Chromium's Developer tools.

finnless 2y ago
https://www.uploadvr.com/content/media/2025/02/NBA-Apple-Vision-Pro-Tabletop-view.mp4 https://www.uploadvr.com/content/media/2025/02/NBA-Apple-Vis...

paxys 2y ago

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.

Spivak 2y ago
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? NFL: no.

wkirby 2y ago

I don't enjoy basketball and I think the Vision Pro is a crazy stupid product --- but this does look cool as hell. Let me know when they make it work with a real sport.

ugh123 2y ago
What's a real sport?
- wkirby 2y ago
  Pod racing.
- recursive 2y ago
  Snooker
- the_sleaze_ 2y ago
  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.
  - boogieknite 2y ago
    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. called Vantage: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vantage-official/id6698850979 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vantage-official/id6698850979 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
- syndicatedjelly 2y ago

medlazik 2y ago

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.

graypegg 2y ago
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?
- medlazik 2y ago
  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.
  - graypegg 2y ago
    I thought it seemed neat. If I was part of your randomly selected individuals, I would give it the green light. I think the core element of human creativity might be lost in your imagined system of governance.
    - medlazik 2y ago
      "Earth is burning and 99% of humanity is suffering but at least for a century we were oh so creative" You in 2062, most probably
      - graypegg 2y ago
        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)

tjohns 2y ago

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.

dylan604 2y ago
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.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  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.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    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.

gwbas1c 2y ago

> 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.

brudgers 2y ago
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.
- j_bum 2y ago
  I have aphantasia… so audio sports broadcasts are awful for me. Radio sports sound like a long string of facts that I need to remember but can get overwhelmed with. I’m jealous that radio is immersive for you!
- walthamstow 2y ago
  Cricket on the radio is absolute bliss, I'm sure Americans feel the same about baseball.

daft_pink 2y ago

Do they have this for F1?

terramex 2y ago
There was unofficial Lapz app ( https://www.lapz.io https://www.lapz.io ) on TestFlight but got taken down after complaint from F1: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301420/apple-vision-pro-viral-lapz-app-f1-complaint https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301420/apple-vision-pr... 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.

somewhereoutth 2y ago

Probably I'd want better seats! 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).

williamcotton 2y ago
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.

fullshark 2y ago

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.

tombert 2y ago
They've been mature for awhile. 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.

asadotzler 2y ago

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.

erulabs 2y ago

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.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Well the more serious problem is that a suitable 3D 360 camera for the Vision Pro doesn’t actually exist yet. And even the few 3D 180 cameras are extremely bulky, expensive, and not even taking full advantage of every pixel.

zombiwoof 2y ago

Until they embrace porn this product is dead

deleted 2y ago
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gigel82 2y ago

Oh wow, both users must be ecstatic./s

zakki 2y ago

I prefer Australia Open approach. I mean I don't need to have thousands dollar device to get the fun of it.

rs186 2y ago

Cool. How many people are going to use it? How much money is this going to make? I'm not putting my bets on NBA or Apple for this thing.

dmix 2y ago
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.

garrisswimmer 2y ago

[dead]

ngokevin 2y ago

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.

syndicatedjelly 2y ago

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.