Apple takes first immersive baseball swings from the on-deck circle

Apple’s Friday Night Baseball made its immersive video debut on the Vision Pro Friday, with numerous live immersive cameras scattered around Yankee Stadium for the night’s game between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Apple has produced a lot of immersive video, including some sports documentaries and a set of live L.A. Lakers games, and it’s been clear that the makers of all that content have assumed that immersive video should be produced more or less like regular sports content: with lots of quick cuts, despite the fact that quick cuts in immersive video can be disorienting in a way that cuts in standard 16:9, 2-D video aren’t.

There’s no clear agreement about the ideal solution. I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts and replicate being at the game in person.

Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game, seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach—and it does benefit from it. Each half inning was shown from a single camera on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout.

Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in the way of my view of the game itself.

In between innings, the broadcast stayed in the park—and this is when it would occasionally switch to a different angle, such as at the outfield fence, behind first base, in the club level behind home plate, or looking down into the dugout. There were also replays—carefully demarcated with animated graphics, to reduce confusion—of key plays from the previous inning from the immersive perspective.

In the end, it felt much more like I was sitting at Yankee Stadium watching the game. Apple’s dedicated commentators tried to point out things you couldn’t see if you were watching a standard telecast, like defensive positioning. The commentary was fine (though I wish it had been a bit less chatty), but I would also have been happy to have the option to listen to natural audio, or just the local radio broadcast.

I do wish there had been a little bit more experimentation in terms of the primary camera angle. (Disclosure: I only watched three innings before needing to leave home to catch a flight.) I would’ve been interested in seeing an inning from behind first or third base, just to get a little bit of a different angle.

Still, I think Apple’s first immersive live baseball production was successful. I saw the Yankee catcher commit interference and then get hit in the arm by a brutal backswing; I saw a wide throw from shortstop almost (but not quite) pull the first baseman off the bag. I saw Yankee manager Aaron Boone constantly spitting a stream of sunflower seeds on the warning track in front of the dugout rail. And most delightfully, every few minutes a train zipped past the stadium out in the outfield, visible in a crack between the stands and the scoreboard.

Will immersive sports amount to anything? I don’t think anyone knows, but this latest experiment suggests that the people producing Apple’s immersive sports are actually learning and experimenting. I’m encouraged, and I’ll tune in next week for sure.