Yo, ACC: Formula One Knows What To Do With Apple’s New Vision Pro

We talked a bit on Thursday about how we would hope that the ACC is doing everything it can to be sure it’s available on Apple’s upcoming new platform, the Vision Pro. If you haven’t heard, the Vision Pro is a headset that has AR and VR capabilities, dual 4K screens that can project an enormous screen and some highly immersive qualities that will quickly apply to sports.

If the ACC’s not paying attention yet, Formula 1 is. And this is a pretty compelling case for the technology.

Formula 1 is talking about having these headsets on the drivers. In fact, this article suggests that F1 has been testing Apple’s technology for some time now.

Watching the game with this sort of technology is going to be mind blowing because you’ll see the race, from the driver’s point of view, in an insanely immersive way, possibly in 3-D. These cars can hit 220 in a straightaway. That would be surreal - and F1 will have created a new market that might be more compelling than video games.

When you start thinking about this stuff a little more seriously for the ACC, a few things come into focus.

For instance, what we’ve mostly focused on is video and ways to present it. But audio is part of the experience too and being able to hear players on the court or field would be a big deal. Same for coaches and referees and fans. You’d want to feel like you were there in every sense.

The ACC might consider this too. When the iPhone first debuted in 2007 there was no App Store. That came along a year later with 500 apps.

By 2017, the App Store had about 2 million apps.

Even by iPhone App Store standards that we’re used to, you can think of some basic apps that the ACC could market and sell to use with Vision Pro.

But with this new, radical technology? For apps, it’s the Wild West all over again. We’ll say it again: it’s vital that the ACC get into this space, begin to understand it, and then make it part of the fan experience. It’s going to take a while for all of this to click in. Simply producing enough of these to drive the prices down won’t be easy and it’ll take awhile for it to reach critical mass.

But that’s also learning time and a chance to make mistakes early when they’re less critical. And also, as the league learned from the Big Ten Network, it pays to get there first.