By Jason Snell
March 29, 2024 11:22 AM PT
Apple’s Immersive Video problem
On Thursday Apple debuted its first immersive video since the Vision Pro launched, a five-minute-long compilation of highlights from the MLS Cup playoffs late last year.
Without even seeing the video, I had many questions. Why did it take more than three months to produce a highlight package? And why, when it finally arrived, was it only five minutes long? And what do those two facts suggest about how difficult it is for Apple to produce immersive video content on an ongoing basis?
Now, having seen the video, I have a few more observations. The first is that I don’t think the new video is very good. Oh, sure, the individual shots can be impressive. Being that close to professional athletes doing their thing is stunning, and being in a giant stadium thrumming with fan energy is pretty awesome.
The problem is that, based on how Apple and MLS built the video, it’s not actually immersive.
As you might expect from the runtime, the video is a highlight package, with lots of quick cuts. Video’s all about quick cuts. I’m a child of the ’80s; music videos ingrained the value of the quick cut at a formative age.
But immersive video doesn’t work with quick cuts, I don’t think. Several times during the MLS highlights video, my head was turned in one direction, taking advantage of the 180-degree immersive space to watch something happening off to my left or right… only for the vantage point to change to a different perspective. Now I was staring at nothing. It would take a few seconds for me to scan my surroundings and re-orient—often times a delay that led me to miss the highlight I was meant to be viewing.
Most of Apple’s initial immersive videos, launched with the Vision Pro, linger with long shots. Cuts happen, but only occasionally. The pace is such that when a cut occurs, there’s time to re-orient. You need time to immerse. Quick cuts in a regular video help speed up the action; in immersive video, they’re like hitting a speed bump.
I get that immersive videos are basically a new medium and it’ll take a lot of experimentation to find the best way to present them. I’m sure that behind the scenes, Apple and its media partners are working on it. I’m glad the MLS highlight video exists, because it taught me some important lessons about this new medium. Unfortunately, they’re largely of the “what not to do” variety.
I still firmly believe that immersive video is going to be amazing for sports, live theater, concerts, and other live events. But those are events that take time, spooling out over several hours. A tightly edited highlight reel, it turns out, might be the worst possible showcase for immersive video.
Regardless of how I feel about this particular video, I hope Apple has much, much more planned. Perhaps the single clear consumer use case for the Vision Pro is video viewing, and immersive video is a unique part of that. It was one of the aspects of the Vision Pro that I was most excited about, and as a result it’s been one of the biggest disappointments.
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