Sinclair Broadcast Group
Background
NewsON’s motto is “Live. Local News. Nationwide.” It certainly lives up to that promise. With over 280 local TV station partners, NewsON covers 90% of the U.S. news markets. Its free app — already available on iOS, Android, Roku, Amazon, and others — provides access to live and on-demand newscasts from all major networks across the country.
The Opportunity
The release of Apple’s Vision Pro spatial computing tool may be the biggest hardware release in the last decade. NewsON sought to pioneer the platform and establish itself at the forefront of media in the age of mixed reality.
NewsON has the potential as one of the earliest broadcast adopters of spatial computing and visualization, but also the most innovative as trailblazers in this new space. While iOS apps will function (with very limited functionality) on the Vision Pro, we sought the challenge of exploring and pushing the potential of this new medium.
Our Approach
NewsON’s Vision Pro app already had a roadmap; this would be a reimagining of an app that already existed, which made the project easy to manage. The question wasn’t really about whether we would test spatial computing’s features, but how we might push them.
From the first Apple Keynote when Vision Pro was announced, our team anticipated its arrival and started exploring both its new opportunities and constraints.
“Dancing About Architecture”
To paraphrase an old maxim, writing about the Vision Pro is like “dancing about architecture,” but we’re going to try to explain anyway. Its integration with Apple’s existing systems is unparalleled. Users can customize their actual physical surroundings with its augmented apps and tools.
For example, you might have a Spotify app in the corner of your office, while your Messages window sits on your desk right next to your mouse and keyboard. You can still use the latter two on your Mac’s “monitor,” but now you can resize that to be as big as a movie screen or as small as your eyes will allow. Its customizations are seemingly endless, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of its potential.
Keep in mind that we started developing this app before anyone could actually use a Vision Pro, so prototyping would be a hurdle. In lieu of hardware access, we knew we needed to create mockups with realistic fidelity so everyone could design and give feedback in lockstep from concept to completion. Luckily, we had the level of trust necessary in a partner like NewsON, as well as a few fresh Vision Pro headsets later in the project.
When is immersion appropriate and when is it not? And how does immersion help/hurt the experience? It’s going to be very interesting to see how we explore that as spatial computing evolves.
– Justin Bend, Project Manager
One of the major benefits of this app is that if something big is happening, you can just find the station on the app and it can take you exactly to where this news is happening.
- Lauren Herda, Interactive Art Director
The Newsroom
The inside of a newsroom is an exciting place. Reporters and editors collaborate at breakneck pace to deliver us the most important information of the day. There’s a weight to being in that room as news breaks, inside scoops drop, and investigations develop.
The app’s newsroom environment allows NewsON’s viewers to feel the insider’s rush of being in the room where (and when) news happens. Unlike other VR/AR environments, Vision Pro’s immersive environments are scalable. Viewers can “dial in” as much (or as little) newsroom experience as they want.
We’re refining our thought of what spatial computing could be, to now thinking about how that works. We’re getting to a point where that’s more practical than theoretical.
- Rob Koch, Mobile Lead
Results that Matter
We’re immensely proud to be at the Vision Pro’s frontier with NewsON. While the space is still a playground for designers and developers across the globe, it’s been a remarkable proving ground for enhancing our capabilities across multiple disciplines.
There’s so much more we’d love to add to NewsON’s visionOS app in the months and years ahead. We’ll add more here as we dive deeper into this exciting new space.