Without Borders The premieres will take place tonight and will take Vision Pro users on a hot air balloon ride in Türkiye.
Overwhelmed will be Apple’s first fictional short film for Vision Pro.
Users will get a preview of the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend.
This cryptic image gives a sneak peek at The Weeknd’s Vision Pro “experience.”
The new series Pupil will visit places of interest around the world seen from above.
Apple teams up with Red Bull for surfing documentary.
Wildlife returns with an episode about elephants in a wildlife reserve.
Today, Apple announced a slate of more than a dozen upcoming immersive videos for its Vision Pro spatial reality headset. The first, titled Without Borderswill launch tonight at 9pm ET, with more to follow in the coming weeks and months.
The announcement follows a long slowdown for new video content specific to Apple’s Vision Pro. The headset launched in early February with a handful of immersive video episodes ranging from five to 15 minutes each. Since then, only three new videos have been added.
On March 28, Apple released a highlight reel of the Major League Soccer season that had ended a few months earlier. A second episode of Prehistoric PlanetApple’s immersive dinosaur nature documentary, Immersive Video, went live on April 19. Also, a new episode of Adventure The series titled “Parkour” was released on May 24.
The MLS video feels more like a short commercial for Apple’s MLS programming than anything else, but other immersive videos have impressed with their quality, if not their creative ambition. They’re all short videos that place the viewer in a moment in space and time with animals or people doing their thing. The videos are high-resolution, and the 3D is generally well done. The production values are high, even if the narratives are light. They feel more like tech demos, but they’re impressive.
This evening Without Borders The episode will let viewers see what it’s like to fly in a hot air balloon over scenic vistas. Another episode, titled “Arctic Surfing,” will be released this fall, Apple said. Next month, Apple will release the second episode of its wildlife documentary, simply titled WildlifeThe episode will focus on the elephants of the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya. Another episode is also in the works. “Later this year,” Apple wrote in its press release. Press room article“Viewers will brave the depths with a daring group of divers in the Bahamas, who will come face-to-face with apex predators and discover creatures far more complex than often portrayed.”
Others are in preparation
In September, we will see the debut of a new immersive video series called PupilApple describes the series as an “air travel series” in which viewers will fly over landmarks. The first episode will take viewers to Hawaii, while another scheduled for later this year will head to New England.
Apple is also partnering with Red Bull for a surfing test called Red Bull: Big Wave Surfing.
In addition to these documentary episodes, three short films will be released by the end of the year. One of them will be a musical experience featuring The Weeknd, and another will take basketball fans through the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend. There will also be Overwhelmedthe first immersive narrative fiction video on the platform. It is a short action film depicting the difficulties aboard a submarine during World War II.
It’s good to see Apple finally doing something about this; the post-launch content drought hasn’t inspired confidence in the platform. Many people with mixed reality headsets use them intensively for a few weeks, but either can’t find a way to integrate them into their daily routine or run out of interesting content and quickly lose interest. To keep people interested in visionOS, Apple needs to maintain a rapid cadence of new content that users look forward to at least every week. Otherwise, some users will see their headsets sit on the shelf, forgotten.
When I tested the Vision Pro, I assumed the immersive video episodes would be released weekly. That wasn’t the case, and it appears that’s still not the case. Apple is going to have to invest more in content (and take more risks with that content, beyond short tech demo documentaries) to keep the Vision Pro popular with customers.
List image by Apple