// THE VERGE — HARDWARE & GADGET
I went to the loneliest baseball game on Apple Vision Pro
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Watching the Red Sox-Yankees game on a headset is for someone — just not for me.
Watching the Red Sox-Yankees game on a headset is for someone — just not for me.
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This weekend, I strapped on an Apple Vision Pro to watch a baseball game in immersive virtual reality for the first time. It was technically impressive, visually pretty remarkable, and also didn’t make that much sense.
Apple and Major League Baseball chose a classic match-up of the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees for the first of its series of four games streamed on the device. I do not review tech for The Verge, but I do watch a lot of baseball — if there’s a game on and I’m at home, it’s likely on my television. If this is the future of sports, live events, and wearable technology in general, I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.
The first thing to know about baseball is that it is long: in season, in game time, and in the arc of history. Right off the bat, this reality makes having a screen strapped to your face a hard sell. It’s not just the physical burden — like many others, I find the Vision Pro heavy and cumbersome — but also because it’s a time honored tradition to get up and go do something else for a moment while the game is on. It’s America’s pastime for a reason: the slowness, the buildup, the culmination of a long, sticky season where teams slump and get hot. Some nights are duds and others are classics; you are playing (and watching) the long game. Even at the ballpark, you might get up to grab food or another beer, and the seventh inning stretch is built right into live play to give fans a break. With an immersive environment, I struggled with whiplash; coming in and out of the headset’s reality, going from zero to one hundred and back again anytime I wanted to grab a drink, walk around, or eat dinner.