The Apple CEO was huddled over an iMac in the NBA’s league headquarters in New York alongside NBA commissioner Adam Silver, flanked by a wall of regulation basketballs. Tim Cook stated that "The NBA’s app for Apple Vision Pro is a real game changer for basketball fans! Thanks to the NBA app development team and Adam Silver for taking me through how they designed it.

(Click on image to Greatly Enlarge)

The NBA had been hard at work on a dedicated app for the device, and two of its developers, senior software engineers Lauren Marshall and Matthew Parrott, were walking Cook and Silver through its features, like the ability to watch up to five games at once, the possibilities of immersive video, and, as Cook inquired about, real-time stats that can be displayed next to the live games.

"I’ve seen several demos of the output of different games, and it’s just mind blowing, it’s so much different," Cook said, when quizzed by The Hollywood Reporter about the potential of the device. "It’s hard to go back to the 2-D world after you’ve been in the 3-D world, you just don’t want to do it."

"I think what the marketplace is going to do now is cause other content creator organizations — not just the NBA — to look at the transformative nature of this and start investing," Silver added, recalling a meeting with Cook years earlier in his office, where the tech executive urged the league to invest in its own direct-to-consumer operations.

“There’s a strong incentive now for us to take this global content and find ways to distribute it around the world and create an even more engaging and immersive experience. So I think you’re going to see a lot of content creators saying, we need our own developers, we need our own engineers. We can’t just leave it to others, and that’ll raise the bar for everybody.”

"I think the fan wants to be a part of the game and a part of the action, and there’s nothing like being in Vision Pro and feeling like you’re on the court," Cook says. "It’s not that you have a courtside seat. It’s so much better than that." For more on this, read the full report by the Hollywood Reporter.

Unfortunately the Hollywood Reporter article didn't provide a launch window for the NBA's Vision Pro app.