The future is here.
At least that’s what longtime fishing YouTuber Jon Barzacchini (Jon B.) would tell you after he recently posted a video showing how an Apple Vision Pro headset can be utilized while fishing.
Obviously, electronics are a hot topic in bass fishing right now, with the big debate surrounding the use of forward-facing sonar. Last month, we just saw Jacob Wheeler and Dustin Connell win the first two stages of the MLF Bass Pro Tour shaking a minnow-style Rapala Crush City Freeloader on jighead, utilizing forward facing to find these suspended fish. The technique is just killing it lately.
Critics of LiveScope will call it “video game fishing,” but just wait until they get a look at this (don’t tell Randy Blaukat).
But if you love fishing and you have a spare $3,499 laying around to purchase the augmented reality glasses (add a few more thousand for your LiveScope unit), you could change the way you fish forever.
Jon B. was able to link up his Apple Vision Pro headset, which allows for users to see the real world through high-tech goggles while also viewing the high-tech Apple interface, to his LiveScope forward-facing sonar unit.
That means that as a fishermen, instead of staring down at your graph, you could look out to where you are casting and be able to see where fish are swimming, and where your bait is dropping. The technology is there now, but it still needs some work. He explained in the video that the headset and the front-facing sonar working together wasn’t perfect by any means:
“For whatever reason, this Apple Vision Pro gets very tweaky whenever I’m moving. I can tell you right now these glasses are not meant for an angler that likes to move around and fish.”
But after a number of different attempts and recalculations, along with a boatload of patience, the YouTuber eventually had everything come together. Around the 13-minute mark, he successfully uses the Apple Vision Pro to scope out an area, cast, and then reel in a fish… though it eventually got off the line.
His excitement during the process was impossible to hide:
“There goes my bait. He sees it! He sees it. Oh my gosh, this could happen, folks… got him! No way. No way. We did it.”
If the YouTuber set out to show people that the Apple Vision Pro’s tech could be utilized for fishing, he was definitely successful in doing so. I don’t personally see how it’s much different from just looking at your graphs, but the concept is still pretty cool.
However, he states later in the video that though you could go out on the lake and reel in some fish with help from the new augmented reality product, it almost defeats the purpose of fishing:
“I think over the past couple years people have really forgotten what fishing is all about and why we do it, myself included. I’ll admit it’s hard not to use these tools if we can afford them and if they’re available to us. But ultimately, at the end of the day, (we) have to ask why do we do what we do.”
Well said.
