What a Disney-Powered Vision Pro Means for Entertainment’s Future
Leave it to an entertainment mogul to pull off a great cameo, even if it’s at a tech-industry presentation instead of in a movie.
When Disney CEO Bob Iger graced the virtual stage toward the end of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference to help plug the heavily hyped new headset Vision Pro, he almost stole the show from Tim Cook. The Apple CEO may have played the leading man in this particular production, but Iger is a lock to win best supporting actor.
Iger was onscreen for no more than four minutes of the two-hour-plus runtime, but that was all he needed to offer a spellbinding vision of a future in which Vision Pro came across as nothing less than a game-changing new medium for entertainment.
Of course, Iger’s vision for Vision Pro came with few specifics beyond the fact that Disney+ will be available to watch on the headset when it launches. Cook referenced the participation of other streaming services, but again no details.
Still, there were technical details aplenty on Vision Pro’s “spatial” video and audio capabilities, which made wearing the device sound something like clamping an Imax screen to your face.
The rest of Iger’s message seemed fanciful as he imagined all the possibilities of what’s to come from Disney via Vision Pro without spelling out exactly what if any of the features he was describing was actually going to be available at launch. Some seemed as theoretical as all the great gizmos you used to see on an average episode of “The Jetsons” but probably won’t ever experience as real-life products.
Nevertheless, Disney’s Vision Pro segment of Cook’s presentation made for a tantalizing dream — even if making it a reality may take Disney’s Imagineering division a century to execute.
The odd thing about Disney’s inclusion was that at first blush it seemed as if Apple was intentionally playing down any entertainment tie-in to Vision Pro. The headset’s demo clearly emphasized applications that had more to do with work and telecommunications than content. And early reports that director Jon Favreau was collaborating with Apple on programming for the headset weren’t evident in the presentation.
But then came Iger, whose mere presence as an outsider in a presentation otherwise stuffed with Apple execs thrust Vision Pro’s entertainment potential front and center. He teed up a sizzle reel that, for example, teased a world in which viewers could use Vision Pro to “experience your favorite stories in unexpected ways,” as a multiscreen display of “The Mandalorian” unspooled onscreen that looked as cluttered as a cockpit dashboard.
Yet as Iger’s Apple cameo continued, I found myself tugged in opposite directions between reveries of entertainment nirvana and memories of promotional excess that have made the VR/AR/MR/XR category such a disappointment.
That visualization Disney offered at WWDC of Vision Pro enabling me to look at an augmented-reality 3D version of Mickey Mouse prancing around my living room? It gave me a bad case of déjà vu for the kind of visual trickery made famous by Magic Leap, the last ballyhooed startup that was supposed to make a headset that merged the actual with the digital for consumers. Then the company burned through enough billions to force a pivot to the enterprise market.
That invocation of Disney+’s “What If” series about Marvel superheroes, but with the twist here that the consumer becomes the protagonist as the headset allows the story to unfold from the Vision Pro’s perspective? No thanks, I’ve seen enough of Netflix’s interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” nonsense, from “Black Mirror” to “Bear Grylls,” to steer clear.
How about watching sports in a whole new way, where you feel like you’re sitting courtside or in the game itself while you access statistics and make bets as if you had seven eyes in your head to do all this? Sounds dandy, I guess, but I’ve seen NBA commissioner Adam Silver serve up similar demos in recent years that never actually seem to make it to market.
Even if Vision Pro looks like the world’s coolest ski goggles, will that make watching a movie inside a bulky headset any less cumbersome? Or make trying the co-viewing watch party mode these devices everyone thought for one hot minute during the pandemic would popularize?
I understand that Vision Pro is not the fully realized incarnation of what this product could one day be. But I also understand that there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed in marketing, and it’s between what a product can actually do at launch and what is really just pie in the sky. Go a little too far to entrance the customer and you’ve overpromised/underdelivered.
Disney and Apple are continuing down a path that has been so thoroughly scorched by innovative but impractical experiments that never seem quite ready for primetime that it’s hard to get enthusiastic about sampling the next one, particularly when it comes to strapping anything to your head. Google Glass and 3DTV also bear some blame here, but we still have yet to mention the biggest offender on this front.
That would be Meta, which found out the hard way how difficult it can be to realize the promise of a sizzle reel that goes way too far. Think back to 2019 when Mark Zuckerberg first unveiled the Facebook Horizon VR social platform.
Fast-forward four years, and the metaverse his company has spent billions to bring to life has been a disaster. While a few too many shortsighted critics are prematurely dancing on Horizon’s grave, it is fair to say the company may have been better served not overpromising.
Apple has clearly been on the mind of Zuckerberg, who conveniently timed the unveiling of the latest incarnation of Meta’s own handset, Quest 3, to a presentation of his own last week with more than a few nods toward the mixed-reality approach Vision Pro was expected to employ. One can only imagine what Zuckerberg thought of the Disney portion of the Apple showcase given Quest’s own flirtations with Hollywood have never gotten buy-in from the likes of Iger.
Who knows, maybe David Zaslav or Shari Redstone sense an opening here and are furiously trying to get Zuckerberg on the phone as we speak?
Iger understands the risk he takes when a mogul of his stature shills as a sidekick pitchman for Cook, lending his gravitas to the latest doohickey du jour coming out of Cupertino. But Iger is a longtime Apple polisher, and for good reason: You can argue that nothing has burnished this man’s mystique more than his close association with Apple going back to the Steve Jobs era.
When Jobs first introduced iTunes, it was Disney that struck first among the content companies to get its TV shows and movies on the platform. Planting his flag first in Vision Pro is right out of the same Iger playbook.
But don’t forget how early hype eventually gave way to sobering reality for iTunes: The download-to-own $1.99-per-episode offering Apple tried to make the model for the digital distribution of entertainment was eventually vaporized by Netflix’s all-you-can-watch rental buffet alternative. Iger sprinkling Disney pixie dust on that launch didn’t ultimately matter.
Nearly 10 years ago, when Zuckerberg first unveiled the device previously known as Oculus Rift without much fanfare focused on its implications for entertainment, I nevertheless wrote a commentary breathlessly titled, “Oculus Rift Just Put Facebook in the Movie Business.”
Thankfully, I also had the good sense to label the article with a more cautionary hedge anchored by a very well chosen parenthetical: “Virtual reality headsets pose (very) long-term threat to the theatrical business.”
A decade later, I don’t regret going out on that limb, because I still do believe these headsets will eventually become an entertainment medium in their own right. And even as I wouldn’t be surprised if it took another 10 years for Apple and Disney to get even closer to that goal, my faith isn’t even shaken by the overcaffeinated marketing that does the companies that employ it a disservice.
This time around, though, I’ll be very, very, very cautiously optimistic.