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Apple today announced a set of more than a dozen upcoming Immersive Videos for its Vision Pro spatial reality headset. The first, titled Boundless, kicks off tonight at 9pm ET. More will follow in the coming weeks and months.

The announcement follows a long and slow period for new Vision Pro-specific video content from Apple. The headset launched in early February with several episodes of immersive video ranging from five to 15 minutes each. Only three new videos have been added since then.

On March 28, Apple released highlights of Major League Soccer games from the season that ended months ago. Second episode of A prehistoric planetdinosaur nature documentary Immersive Video by Apple went live on April 19. Likewise, a new episode of An adventure the series, titled “Parkour,” landed on May 24.

The MLS video played more like a short advertisement for Apple’s MLS programming than anything else, but other immersive videos impressed with their quality, if not their creative ambition. They are 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 definition and the 3D is generally well done. Production values ​​are high even if the narratives are light. They look like tech demos if anything, but they’re impressive.

Tonight Boundless the episode will let viewers see what it’s like to ride in a hot air balloon over sweeping vistas. Another episode, titled “Arctic Surfing,” will arrive this fall, Apple says. Sometime next month, Apple will release the second episode of its simply titled Real Wildlife documentary Wild life. The episode will focus on the elephants at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya. Another episode is also in the works. “Later this year,” Apple wrote in its editorial post, “viewers will tackle the depths with a brave group of scuba divers in the Bahamas who come face-to-face with the apex predators and discover creatures far more complex than is often introduced.”

Still on the way

September will see the debut of a new Immersive Video series titled Raised. Apple describes it as an “air travel series” where viewers will fly over interesting locations. The first episode will take viewers to Hawaii, while another planned for later this year will go to New England.

Apple additionally partnered with Red Bull for a look at surfing called Red Bull: Big Wave Surfing.

In addition to these documentary episodes, there will be three short films by the end of the year. One will be a musical experience featuring The Weeknd, and the other will take basketball fans to NBA All-Star Weekend in 2024. There will also be Immersed, the first Narrative Fictional Immersive Video on the platform. This is a short action film describing the battles of a submarine during the Second World War.

It’s good to see Apple finally making some kind of move here; the post-launch content drought doesn’t inspire confidence in the platform. Many people with mixed reality headsets use them a bunch for a few weeks, but either fail to find ways to fit them into their daily habits, or they run out of compelling content and soon decline. To keep people invested in visionOS, Apple needs to maintain a fast cadence of new content that users look forward to at least weekly. Otherwise, some users will see their headphones sitting on the shelves, forgotten.

When I reviewed Vision Pro, I assumed that Immersive Video episodes would be released weekly. That hasn’t proven the case, and it still doesn’t look like it. Apple will need to invest more in content (and take more risks with that content, going beyond short tech demo documentaries) to make Vision Pro stick with customers.

List image from Apple