In 2004, Ashland was one of the first towns to webcast (stream) its July 4 parade. In 2007, Alan and company live-streamed the parade from the parade.
As early as next year (July 4, 2026, for the U.S. Semiquincentennial) we hope to reprise those early glimpses of the Future with yet another early glimpse of the Future: live-streamed immersive video.
Like most of Future Past, basic real-time streaming is now fairly well distributed: anyone with an iPhone and a Facebook or similar account can live-stream anything they want (compare that capability to last century’s three TV stations). It also is much improved from our early, tiny, choppy 2004 stream. In fact it’s even higher quality than last century’s TV.
But it’s still really just TV. You watch it. You listen to it, maybe in stereo if you’re lucky. But you don’t experience it. That’s where immersive “VR” (virtual reality) headsets like the Apple Vision Pro come in. Once the Future Future of live-streamed immersive video (or whatever it ends up being called) is here, you will not be watching the parade, you will be in the parade.
At last month’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) Apple introduced a number of new technologies that will help Future distributors like us bring immersive video to a much wider audience. Whether we’ll be able to adapt those technologies in time for next year’s Ashland semiquincentennial parade, how well they will actually work, and how the audience will get to experience that parade, remain to be seen.
Watch this space.