Bono’s ‘Stories of Surrender’ on Apple Vision Pro shows the future of storytelling
Apple offers a surreal experience of having Bono sing for you in your home, but it will cost you a whopping $6000.
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I strapped Apple’s Vision Pro on my face to watch Bono: Stories of Surrender (Immersive) concert at home and was suddenly gripped by deja vu.
Eighteen months earlier I had watched Postcard from Earth at The Sphere Las Vegas, a 20,000 seat auditorium that has a wraparound interior of LED screens to create an 155-degree diagonal field of view.
When I started watching the show at The Sphere I felt underwhelmed, with Postcard from Earth beginning on a strip of the LED display, taking a similar area to a traditional cinema screen. There was no wrap around experience. Then the film exploded to life, rippling across the wrap around display, providing a similar experience to when the Wizard of Oz transitioned from sepia to colour.
It was the same with Bono. The start of Stories of Surrender was a compelling performance from the US frontman, with him reciting a passage from his memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.
While visceral, he recounted his experience on the operating table while having open-heart surgery in 2016, it was not immersive, and I felt a bit cheated.
But when he began to sing his first song, Vertigo, the immersive button was flicked on. All of a sudden, I was viewing the show in 3D from the back of a packed, swelling crowd at New York’s Beacon Theatre.
The scene was then cut to Bono singing on stage. In 3D and full wrap around experience. I could look down and see his shows. I could look at his chest and see a faint scar from his heart surgery, poking through his unbuttoned shirt. It was like Bono was singing only for me, in front of me, fully in the flesh.
It provides a 180-degree field of view, streamed in 8k. There is a screen for each eye on the Vision Pro, enabling the 3D experience.
It has provided a level of intimacy never before experienced in home cinema – even in IMAX theatres. Stories of Surrender is filmed in black and white, adding to this feeling of rawness and closeness. The only jolt from the suspension of disbelief that it provides is the weight of the headset, which remains a key flaw of Vision Pro.
It weighs 650 grams, and as I sit in my lounge chair, I begin to feel every gram of that weight after about 20 minutes of viewing.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook has a solution for this. He prefers to lay on his couch and project the Vision Pro onto his screen. This is also a first generation model. In other words, it’s the worst spatial computer that Apple will produce, with future iterations likely becoming lighter and more intuitive to the point they will be no different as wearing a pair of glasses.
The Bono: Stories of Surrender is significant for Vision Pro. It is Apple’s first feature length immersive film, with a one hour, 26 minute run time. This eclipses its previous longest immersive film, a 25-minute Metallica concert.
Stories of Surrender isn’t entirely immersive throughout. Most of the time it provides an experience akin to going to a cinema, projecting a floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall-sized screen. But the moments it flicks to immersive 3D are used intelligently, enhancing dramatic effects.
It shows that Apple is serious about Vision Pro, which is a polarising device, particularly with its $5999 starting price. But those who have leant into the new system have praised its ability to create an experience akin to viewing something in the flesh – like Bono singing to them from less than a ruler-length away.
Apple also provided the Bono film in standard format on its TV+ service. But watching it on a regular TV is not the same as viewing it on Vision Pro and Bono’s content, his raw narrative – which includes recounting the death of his mother Iris from an aneurysm when his 14 and his father and his two brothers rarely mentioning her again, such was the scale of their grief.
“It wasn’t like she was dead. It was worse. We disappeared her,” he says.
Vision Pro, while still in its infancy, has created a new medium to tell stories in a more engaging way – a welcome move in our postmodernist era where artificial intelligence threatens creativity, churning out homogenised slop to feed our increasingly shortened attention spans.
Of course, you could always go and see Bono play live, and risk the temptation of taking your phone out of your pocket to remain fully in the moment.
As Paul McCartney says often at his concerts: “When we play an old Beatles song, the place lights up with all your phones like a galaxy of stars. When we play a new one, it’s like a black hole”.
The beauty about Vision Pro, is it keeps your eyes on one screen at a time, allowing you to stay completely engaged in the moment, and that is something worth surrendering to.
Originally published as Bono’s ‘Stories of Surrender’ on Apple Vision Pro shows the future of storytelling
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