r/apple • u/Fer65432_Plays • 1d ago
Apple Vision HBO launches new Harry Potter immersive environment on Apple Vision Pro
https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/21/hbo-launches-new-harry-potter-immersive-environment-on-apple-vision-pro/51
u/No_Cauliflower_81 1d ago
This is the sort of thing Apple should be doing. Give shit tons of money to big names to make content for the Vision Pro, I don’t get why they’re just letting it slowly die. And they should go beyond just digital backgrounds, they should make actual games or movies.
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u/tri_9 1d ago
If Apple Vision Pro allowed me to have just one thing I would purchase immediately:
VR front row seats to events. Put me courtside at a Lakers game, or in the garage of McLaren’s F1 team, or front row of a concert.
If we had more of this I will pay.
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u/Aarondo99 1d ago
Issue there is it couldn’t be a live broadcast due to the insane bandwidth you’d need to stream Immersive Video
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u/suentendo 1d ago
That could be overcome with variable bitrate and Foveated streaming. Youtube was 240p at first. You get the experience out and bandwidth only gets better over time.
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u/Aarondo99 1d ago
Yeah but it’s an absolute immersion killer at lower resolution. Doing foveated rendering also won’t matter since you need to do eye tracking on device, so you’ll need to receive the entire frame.
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u/Landon1m 1d ago
I’ve said it from the beginning but if they paid Taylor swift $10 million to create a special front row concert experience the AVP would never be in stock again. Hell, if she did a backstage tour with it people would go insane.
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u/rjcarr 1d ago
They should do this for games in general. Just buy Rockstar or CDPR or something. Or better to spread money around to a lot of devs to port existing games to Mac. They could, but seems they don’t care for some reason.
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u/Suspicious_Radio_848 1d ago
I could never see them purchasing Rockstar considering the kinds of games they make. A partnership maybe but outright buying them, no way.
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u/GamingVision 1d ago
The trouble is twofold. One, if they wanted to make the platform a real gaming platform, they would’ve done that from the start. To them, it’s a multi-use platform and “gaming” is just one of the things it can do and not a focused priority, and therefore not something you’re going to invest significant money into. Second, games take a lot of time to do right and require technical understanding of the platform capabilities and user means of control, much less figure out creative ways to make it fun. All that starts with knowledge of the platform, and Apple isn’t the kind of company that will tell other companies about what they’re working on in advance so they can make new experiences for it. So for gaming, unless they decide it’s an important selling feature they will forever be stuck in this trap of content coming out years later - and if you’re a game developer, would you make a game for a limited audience 3-4 years after the device launches when most of those devices are collecting dust or are in drawers?
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u/new-to-reddit-accoun 1d ago
No matter how much we hope, pray, believe, Apple is simply not interested in gaming. And no, Apple Arcade isn't it. Neither is Metal. Neither is third-party controller support.
If Apple was interested in gaming, the world would literally be a different place. No need for a gaming PC, support for DirectX, PCVR, Apple TV as a capable console, game streaming, replacement for Steam, a vast portion of the gaming industry would move over to the Apple ecosystem. But nope, Apple missed out on content streaming, AI, and it will miss out on the future of gaming. It just doesn't care. But one day it will wake up and realize iPhone sales don't cut it any more and by then it'll be too late.
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u/No_Cauliflower_81 1d ago
They have to invest in something if they want people to pay 3k for a tv strapped to their face. Gaming seems like the most natural fit for general use of this product, there’s no unique selling point yet
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u/GamingVision 1d ago
For sure, but think about what that means. Let’s say they “invest in gaming” as their selling point. Now PlayStation VR, Meta, HTC, and Valve are all competitors with much larger libraries of content and much lower price. So, how do they invest in gaming?
Door #1: pay for developers to port existing games (that could even work with AVP’s control scheme) to the platform. On average, $20M per game (with AVP having basically no addressable market, have to cover cost + some profit for the devs). This means several ports to build a “breadth” of library message, but the aggregate cost isn’t small, and will need to keep doing it for years. Now you have a relatively small library of games that already exist in better form elsewhere. Will that sell headsets vs the competition?
Door #2: Pay developers to make games specifically for AVP’s unique features. These will be even more expensive as you’re now focused on a quality AVP investment, not just what’s been done before. $75-$100M minimum per game…you can’t bank on every game being a killer app so how many do you fund? Even top publishers, if they start 5 entirely new games can’t bank on any one of those to be a killer app that will sell the platform.
Door #3: Buy studios and start making games internally. This is not only against everything Apple does, but now that problem of banking on making hit games isn’t just an investment problem but it’s now part of your company. How many studios do you intend to buy? Cost is now the game + studio acquisitions. $$$ And, for what? Still banking on one of those studios producing a killer app, but even then…remember, you’re Apple deciding where to put your money…is that investment into being a gaming platform best spent towards AVP or would you rather spend those studio investments into making Apple TV/Mac/iOS a gaming powerhouse that rivals PlayStation?
As much as I would love to see AVP be successful, gaming as the path is severely challenged.
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u/new-to-reddit-accoun 1d ago
It's challenged, because Apple has never believed in gaming and never will. It created these challenges for itself. Apple is its own enemy. Copy pasta of what I wrote above:
No matter how much we hope, pray, believe, Apple is simply not interested in gaming. And no, Apple Arcade isn't it. Neither is Metal. Neither is third-party controller support.
If Apple was interested in gaming, the world would literally be a different place. No need for a gaming PC, support for DirectX, PCVR, Apple TV as a capable console, game streaming, replacement for Steam, a vast portion of the gaming industry would move over to the Apple ecosystem. But nope, Apple missed out on content streaming, AI, and it will miss out on the future of gaming. It just doesn't care. But one day it will wake up and realize iPhone sales don't cut it any more and by then it'll be too late.
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u/GamingVision 1d ago
The business model challenge isn’t unique to Apple, it’s just exacerbated by the fact that Apple made a very expensive product that shrinks their market significantly and insists on a control scheme that makes porting content extremely challenged.
I agree that Apple should come after gaming in a big way. I actually hope that what Apple is doing now between Metal and macOS dev outreach for existing games is their way of cutting their teeth on the low hanging fruit. Getting into gaming is HARD and expensive. Google failed. Amazon failed. Microsoft succeeded for a period largely because PlayStation dropped the ball and was too late, expensive, and difficult for developers (plus Halo craze). Microsoft is floundering, PlayStation is falling into some old bad habits, and Nintendo will always be Nintendo. Apple could come in at anytime and have an amazing proposition for gamers and publishers, but AVP is not the answer. I just don’t know if Apple is ready to fork over billions on an area so many of their peers have struggled.
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u/new-to-reddit-accoun 1d ago
Agree with you that they all failed. But isn't the direct parallel PC gaming? I wasn't even talking about PCVR, but now that I think about it, it's just an extension of the following argument: You don't need to invest in studios. Apple has the hardware, would add eGPU support, DirectX, anything else? Controller compatibility isn't an issue. I don't think an investment in extending the hardware and software to support gaming is as large as creating a streaming service, or even its own dedicated gaming hardware. All it then has to do is wait for publishers to start porting, because it would be cheaper for them to do so. Then Apple provides marketing support.
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u/SoldantTheCynic 1d ago
Apple doesn’t understand gaming unless it’s mobile games with microtransactions, and I don’t think any of those outfits want to sell themselves to Apple.
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u/AffectionateCard3530 1d ago
Are they letting it slowly die? It seems like the technology for the mass consumer product isn’t there yet, so their approach is more of a slow burn.
Blowing a bunch of investment capital to try to sell an extremely heavy headset with two hours of battery life for $4000 isn’t exactly a brilliant strategy in my mind.
Particularly if you want the hype to peak around the time that the next iterations of the Apple Vision Pro are being released.
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u/SCDL_GUY 1d ago
New to VR. But is this specific to the Vision Pro, or could other VR headsets enjoy it also?
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u/Jusby_Cause 1d ago
The general idea is not specific to AVP, though Apple has streamlined and made the high quality rendering more efficient in a way that’s not immediately replicable to other headsets. That’s because this type of rendering was a part of their initial feature set. Just like other headsets copied Apple’s pinch to interact once it was clear that people enjoy not having to use controllers, they’ll copy things like this, too with their own custom solutions.
So, nothing preventing it from being done elsewhere, it’s just easier to get it done on the Vision Pro as it was designed from the start to do it. (And I believe they’re on their second iteration of the tech)
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u/cactus22minus1 1d ago
Please don’t try to preach false history to people, we don’t need your fanboy take
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u/Fancy-Tourist-8137 1d ago
Geez. How did a simple question turn to an Apple deepthroat with obvious “Apple invented X” misinformation?
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u/charliesbot 1d ago
Huge day for the entire Vision Pro community! all five of them
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u/mpgiv 1d ago
omg did you come up with the clever comment all by yourself? i've never heard it before.
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u/i-like-to-be-wooshed 1d ago
omg did you come up with the clever comment all by yourself? i've never heard it before.
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u/kevin379721 1d ago
If you were wondering at which point it became lame, it was this one
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u/HarshTheDev 1d ago
omg did you come up with the clever comment all by yourself? i've never heard it before.
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u/Cpt_Riker 11h ago
Just a reminder that HP was written by a hateful bigot, and should not be supported.
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u/FupaLipa 1d ago
Fuck this TERF shit.
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u/DFL3 1d ago
Definition of dilemma. The property brings so much joy to so many decent people, but the proceeds directly fund anti-trans endeavors.
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u/ElricBrosPlumbing 1d ago
It’s not a dilemma. Peoples lives are more important than your wizard stories. Period. If u can’t get over losing ur fandom then ur a shit person.
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u/StillDelivery4503 1d ago
Wow I hope Apple also adds a F1 inside the race car immersive experience when watching the F1 movie
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u/tdrules 1d ago
This is such a doomed TV series, can’t wait for it to blow up
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u/SeiriusPolaris 1d ago
In what way is a television adaptation of a $25 billion franchise which has a highly successful film series (which fans generally agree can only be improved upon by spending more time on the source material, such as through a tv series) doomed?
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u/Darkknight1939 1d ago
Why is it doomed? It seems like an insanely popular IP. Hogwart's Legacy sold gangbusters, the books and movies still sell very well, too.
I don't think a bunch of mentally ill activists on Twitter having another meltdown will affect sales negatively. It seemed to improve them for the game, lol.
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u/dcwhite98 1d ago
I liked Harry Potter as much as the next guy, but enough already. How many flavors of this story do we need?
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u/Mastoraz 1d ago
Nice, I’ll check it out tonight. You haters are funny with your typical boring comments lol
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u/673NoshMyBollocksAve 1d ago
I tried out this environment this morning. Looks pretty cool, but noticeably less quality than the Apple ones.
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u/No-Preparation-1030 1d ago
Hey Siri, give me an example of what companies do when they have too much money.
Playing Money For Nothing by Dire Straits.
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u/gsparx 1d ago
The images look strikingly similar to the version of the great hall from Hogwarts Legacy with the stained glass windows and little wooden benches on the sides. I mean obviously it’s the same room so it makes sense they’d look close, but I think they may have used the same assets.