He Caught An MLB Home Run On The Fly & Captured It On Video With His Glasses

Brian Watters makes the commute to Miami a couple dozen times a year, more than an hour from his home to the local ballpark.

There he pays homage to the American pastime of baseball. As a toddler, his first games were at Wrigley Field in Chicago, but now he’s nearly 40 and bringing his kids to loanDepot in Miami.

“It’s always been a lifelong dream of mine to catch a home run on the fly,” Watters told me by phone call this week.

He says he’s a “ball-hawk”, what in this context would describe a sub-genre of avid baseball fan obsessed with catching balls sent into the stands. He’s says he’s got about a thousand of them from over the years, including the “cursebreaker” ball he’s getting signed by the world champion 2016 Chicago Cubs.

Most of the balls in his collection are from batting practice, tossed into the stands by players or “mud-rubbed” balls that haven’t seen play but did enter an umpire’s bag. Then there are the autographed balls and the two home runs he retrieved from the ground. Those are family heirlooms.

“I show up early to every game for batting practice,” Watters said. “But the goal is catching home run balls.”

He often brings a couple in his pockets to get autographs. He said he’d seen a couple folks in another fan group that focuses on autographs using the Meta glasses, and he realized they might be usable for his own hobby.

He bought them about six weeks ago and started practicing during spring training. The voice commands are too slow for recording right now.

“Home runs happen pretty fast, so I have to be as quick as possible,” Watters said.

He practiced catching balls while also pressing the button on the glasses as quickly as he could. It’s a lot to do while also calculating the path of a fast-moving object and moving into place for interception among a crowd of people.

On March 31st, the New York Mets played the Marlins at loanDepot and Watters realized a lifelong dream with a crack of the bat. What’s more, he caught it “on my Metas”.

Catching A Home Run

“Oh man, this is gonna take all season,” he thought, but “it only took me four games.”

“I had plenty of time to get to the spot, catch it,” he said. Baseball is “my everything, my whole life. Ever since I was a kid, my dad was a tee-ball coach. When baseball season is over I hibernate and wait till spring.”

Posting videos now to YouTube and TikTok as Catchingballz, Watters finds himself attaching to social media in a way he never has before because of “his Metas”.

“I’ve never used social media like an influencer, it’s always been for family and friends, but nothing to this extent,” he said. “I didn’t even know if I got it recorded until four innings later.”

You can see the moment of extreme focus and execution in the video. “Pure joy” is what he says he felt when he confirmed the achievement was actually saved in video forever.

“I first sent it to my wife at home, then a bunch of friends messaged me,” he said.

The ball-hawk community saw him in the stands on live TV claiming his moment of victory, he said. On Reddit, others shared the clip they saw on TV of the catch. With Watters also sharing his own view, I’ve cut together the clip from the game’s broadcast with the one from Watters, both as shared with me by him. I’ve retained most of the aspect ratio of the MLB broadcast as horizontally-oriented, though I’ve clipped the edges a bit to zoom so you can see him better in the stands. When we cut to Watters’ glasses, we see the full frame of the meta vertical video cutting at nearly the exact same moment.

Oculus to Meta

Watters said he owns an original PlayStation VR headset, and was interested in “the Oculus” but not so much anymore given time constraints of raising a family.

“I always wanted to go the Oculus route, and my interest changed,” he mentioned. “I’m not really into the video gaming anymore, I’m just more into baseball. I have to pick and choose my hobbies.”

He says he’s interested in AR that might show him occasional stats of players, and he’s already used the AI on his glasses to pull up information pretty quickly even without a display of any kind.

Transparent Optics & Focus Mode In AR Glasses

Last year, architect and technology integrator Alex Coulombe wrote about his experience in Meta’s $10,000+ Orion AR glasses prototype. Watters’ accomplishment and his shared desire for AR glasses illustrates some interesting ideas about use cases like this one on hardware like that.

Hypothetically, when he gets to a baseball game anywhere in the world he should be able to point to the infield and say “Hey Meta I’m watching a baseball game over here and trying to catch a home run ball, please don’t distract me with anything else when a player is about to take a swing.”

This hypothetical “focus” mode for AR glasses without a display would be the opposite of the “focus” mode you might experience in practically any piece of software in a VR headset. The former keeps you focused on reality, the latter keeps you focused on virtual reality.

Mixed reality sits somewhere in the middle of both AR glasses and VR headsets, and as we’ve reported exclusively for years now, and Meta’s vision for the future of personal computing includes both VR headsets and AR glasses.

Imagine Watter’s future “Metas” fading away all distracting visuals at just the right time to remind him he needs to be as focused on the plate as every other player on that field. Meanwhile, one of his kids sits beside him in a VR headset, focused on playing Fortnite in a floating window while looking up occasionally at the game. Mixed reality is better in a headset, and the kid has given his Metas a slightly different command than his dad’s pair. The kid points to the field and says:

‘Hey Meta, I’m gonna play Fortnite with my friends but I’m also watching a baseball game and I want to help my dad try to catch a ball, can you help me out?”

As a tense match comes to its conclusion in Fortnite in inning 2, a flickering fairy flies in front of the kid’s screen and darts over to a cluster of glowing lights in the next section of the baseball stadium. Above three glowing lights on the ground his Metas display: “This batter hit 3 home runs here over the last 5 seasons.”

So the kid points: “Hey dad, over there he’s hit a bunch of homers.”

“I’m down for that”, Watters responds when I paint that picture for him.

Do Meta’s upcoming glasses with monocular display support this kind of focus mode?