Immersive video keeps being sold on spectacle: the summit, the reef, the stage from the front row. It’s an understandable pitch and it has a ceiling, because spectacle is exactly what a large flat screen already does well.
Open Season, arriving on the Meta Quest TV app on 29 September 2026, tries the opposite. Its entire premise is sitting in a small room while two people talk.
What it is
Six unscripted therapy sessions with NBA champion Draymond Green and sports psychologist Dr. Carrie Hastings, captured at different points across the 2025-26 season.
Produced by Skydance Sports, Green’s production company The New Media, and Meta, released under the “Meta Presents” banner.
Shot for VR in stereoscopic 3D 180° video on Blackmagic URSA cameras — the same capture platform behind the Apple Immersive Video pipeline we looked at earlier this week. The perspective places the viewer in the room alongside Green and Hastings during their conversations.
Why the format choice is the story
Two production decisions are doing the work here, and both run against the grain of how immersive video is usually made.
Unscripted, in real time, during the season. Green discusses the pressures of his career as they are happening, not recounted afterwards for a camera. Sports documentary almost always works retrospectively — the season is over, the narrative is known, and the interviews are shaped to fit it. Capturing therapy sessions across a live season means nobody involved knows how the story ends, including the subject.
180° stereoscopic rather than 360°. This is the correct choice and it’s worth saying why. A 360° capture means the viewer can look anywhere, which sounds better and is usually worse: there’s nothing behind you, the crew had to hide, and the viewer spends attention deciding where to look. A 180° stereo capture is a framed shot with depth — the director still composes, the viewer still has agency within the frame, and the stereo separation is what carries the sense of being present.
For a piece whose subject is two people in conversation, being in the room at a believable distance is the entire effect. That’s a depth-and-framing problem, not a coverage problem.
The uncomfortable part, named
A therapy session is an intimate clinical space, and the format’s selling point is that it makes you feel like you’re in it. That is worth sitting with rather than glossing.
Everyone involved consented, obviously — this is a produced series with a professional psychologist and an athlete who chose to do it. But the reason immersive capture is interesting here is precisely the reason it’s uneasy: the medium collapses the distance that a flat screen preserves. Watching a filmed therapy session on television is observing a recording. Watching it in stereo 180° at conversational distance is closer to intruding, and the series is presumably counting on that.
Whether that’s powerful or exploitative probably depends on execution. It’s the most interesting question about the project, and it’s not one a press release answers.
What it signals for immersive production
Meta funding original immersive documentary under its own banner, shot on professional cinema kit, is a different move from licensing flat content for a headset’s TV app. It’s the same pattern Apple established with its Immersive Video slate: the platform pays for the content because nobody else will fund a format with this small an audience.
For producers, the practical read: the commissioning money for immersive documentary currently comes from the hardware companies, and their format preferences — 180° stereo, Blackmagic URSA capture, episodic, intimate rather than spectacular — are becoming the de facto standard. If you are pitching immersive non-fiction, that’s the shape of the thing being bought.