I went to the loneliest baseball game on Apple Vision Pro

我在 Apple Vision Pro 上体验了最孤独的一场棒球赛

Watching the Red Sox-Yankees game on a headset is for someone — just not for me. 戴着头显观看红袜队对阵洋基队的比赛，或许适合某些人，但绝对不适合我。

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. 这个周末，我第一次戴上 Apple Vision Pro，以沉浸式虚拟现实的方式观看了一场棒球比赛。从技术上讲，它令人印象深刻，视觉效果也相当惊人，但从实际体验来看，却显得有些莫名其妙。

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. 苹果公司与美国职业棒球大联盟（MLB）选择了波士顿红袜队与纽约洋基队的经典对决，作为该设备四场系列直播的首场比赛。我虽然不为《The Verge》评测科技产品，但我经常看棒球——只要我在家且有比赛，电视上播放的通常就是棒球赛。如果这就是体育赛事、现场活动以及可穿戴技术的未来，我想亲自看看它到底有什么大惊小怪的。

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. 首先要了解的是，棒球比赛非常漫长：无论是赛季长度、单场比赛时间，还是其历史跨度。显而易见，这种现实让“把屏幕绑在脸上”变得难以让人接受。这不仅仅是身体上的负担——和许多人一样，我觉得 Vision Pro 又重又笨重——还因为在比赛期间起身去做点别的事情是一种由来已久的传统。棒球之所以被称为“美国的消遣”，是有原因的：它的节奏缓慢、铺垫漫长，是一个漫长且充满变数的赛季的结晶，球队会有低谷也会有高潮。有些夜晚平淡无奇，有些则堪称经典；你是在参与（并观看）一场持久战。即使在球场，你也会起身去买点吃的或再来杯啤酒，而第七局的拉伸活动更是直接融入了比赛流程，让球迷们可以休息一下。但在沉浸式环境中，我感到非常不适；每当我想去拿饮料、走动或吃晚饭时，都要在头显的虚拟现实与真实世界之间反复切换，这种感觉就像是经历了剧烈的“鞭打”。

That said, the first time I put on the Vision Pro to watch the pregame show, I screamed — it’s surreal to see the players so close, from a new, intimate angle and proximity. It was arresting, surprising, and a little scary. As Yankees starting pitcher Cam Schlittler was warming up in the bullpen, all I could think was, “He really is so tall.” A pregame interview with Jazz Chisholm Jr. made me feel like I was standing uncomfortably close to him. The broadcast on Apple Vision Pro was clearly tailored to an audience who might not be as familiar with MLB or baseball in general: There was a lot of explaining how to watch the game, and many shoutouts to the Vision Pro viewers, of course. 话虽如此，当我第一次戴上 Vision Pro 观看赛前秀时，我还是惊叫了出来——能以如此亲密的新视角和近距离看到球员，这种感觉太超现实了。它引人入胜、令人惊喜，甚至还有点吓人。当洋基队先发投手 Cam Schlittler 在牛棚热身时，我脑子里唯一的想法就是：“他真的好高啊。”赛前对 Jazz Chisholm Jr. 的采访让我感觉自己正站在离他近得让人不舒服的地方。Apple Vision Pro 上的转播显然是为那些可能不太熟悉 MLB 或棒球的观众量身定制的：节目中有很多关于如何观看比赛的讲解，当然，也多次向 Vision Pro 的用户致意。

The feeling of being terrifyingly close didn’t last very long, though. On Vision Pro, you watch the game primarily from two angles, next to each team’s dugout when that team is batting (you’re stuck there, you don’t get to move around as you please). I liked this angle for certain batters, because you can see the vertical movement of pitches come in without anything blocking them. But for say, a righty batter whose team is watching from the third base dugout (or a lefty whose team is watching from the first base side), their body partially obstructs the view. The immersive view also doesn’t track the action in the outfield — your perspective is frozen next to the dugout. As a result, I felt both in the thick of it and at a strange remove; even ground balls and infield plays feel a bit far away, especially if you’re watching from the third base side and there’s traffic on first and second base. 然而，这种近在咫尺的震撼感并没有持续太久。在 Vision Pro 上，你主要从两个角度观看比赛：当某队进攻时，你会被固定在他们休息区（dugout）旁边（你被困在那里，不能随意走动）。对于某些击球手，我喜欢这个角度，因为你可以清晰地看到投球的垂直轨迹，没有任何遮挡。但对于那些从三垒休息区观看比赛的右撇子击球手（或者从一垒侧观看的左撇子），他们的身体会部分遮挡视线。沉浸式视角也不会追踪外野的动作——你的视角被冻结在休息区旁边。结果就是，我既感觉身临其境，又有一种奇怪的疏离感；即使是滚地球和内野防守，看起来也有些遥远，尤其是当你从三垒侧观看，而一垒和二垒上还有跑垒员时。

The immersive broadcast includes a floating jumbotron-style screen that shows a more traditional TV broadcast, along with player stats. I often found my attention drifting up to the standard broadcast, because once the ball leaves the vicinity of the batter, it’s quite hard to track what’s actually going on. The immersive replays from new vantage points like the outfield or closer to first base helped to bridge the feeling of being at a distance. But the Vision Pro’s view isn’t very reactive to what’s happening in real time. When Red Sox second baseman Nick Sogard hit a fly ball early in the game, it almost was a home run — but the immersive view was not very compelling. Baseball is full of weird moments, and it made me wonder how well those would be captured on the Vision Pro. What would the benches clearing in a heated moment look like, given the dugout is blacked out during innings? (For this iconic Red Sox-Yankees brawl, the dugout angle might actually be perfect.) How well could you follow the extremely rare and weird occurrences — like a ball getting wedged between the padding of a wall and the ground — that randomly become extremely important and that most people have never seen happen before? The Red Sox fly ball was caught up against the wall by Yankees centerfielder Trent Grisham in a hopping catch, but the immersive view alone wouldn’t be enough to follow the play closely. You need the TV broadcast screen to supplement the hyperreality. 沉浸式转播包含一个悬浮的巨型屏幕，显示更传统的电视转播画面以及球员数据。我经常发现自己的注意力会飘向标准转播画面，因为一旦球离开击球手附近，就很难追踪到场上到底发生了什么。来自外野或靠近一垒等新视角的沉浸式回放，有助于弥补这种距离感。但 Vision Pro 的视角对实时发生的事件反应不够灵敏。比赛初期，红袜队二垒手 Nick Sogard 打出一记高飞球，差点形成本垒打——但沉浸式视角并没有带来太强的冲击力。棒球充满了奇特的瞬间，这让我怀疑 Vision Pro 能否很好地捕捉到这些时刻。考虑到比赛期间休息区是黑屏的，如果发生冲突导致双方球员冲出休息区，画面会是什么样？（对于红袜队和洋基队这种标志性的冲突，休息区视角或许反而很完美。）你又该如何跟进那些极其罕见且古怪的事件——比如球卡在墙壁软垫和地面之间——这些随机发生却至关重要的瞬间，大多数人可能从未见过？红袜队的那记高飞球最终被洋基队中外野手 Trent Grisham 跃起接住，但仅靠沉浸式视角不足以看清整个过程。你需要电视转播画面来补充这种“超现实”体验。

It all made me wonder who or what watching a game on Vision Pro is for. There were a few moments that really did feel like a new way to experience a very old game. The brief look into the team dugouts, for example, offered views you don’t often get: the screens tucked away with a live feed of the bullpens, or the sunflower seeds flying into the dirt. The on-deck circle, where players do their ritual preparations before it’s their turn up to bat, is visible only occasionally on a broadcast but is in full view on the Vision Pro. After Schlittler was pulled from the game in the sixth inning, the immersive view showed him in the dugout, shaking his head in frustration and heading into the clubhouse, head in hands. You probably wouldn’t get these details in a typical… 这一切让我不禁思考，在 Vision Pro 上看比赛到底是为了谁，或者说有什么意义。确实有几个瞬间让人感觉这是一种体验古老运动的新方式。例如，短暂地窥视球队休息区，提供了平时难得一见的视角：隐藏在角落里显示牛棚实时画面的屏幕，或是飞溅到泥土里的葵花籽。待打区（on-deck circle）是球员轮到击球前进行仪式性准备的地方，在普通转播中偶尔可见，但在 Vision Pro 上却能尽收眼底。当 Schlittler 在第六局被换下场后，沉浸式视角捕捉到他在休息区沮丧地摇头，随后双手抱头走进更衣室。在普通的转播中，你可能无法获得这些细节……