New ‘F1’ Trailer makes Movies More Accessible
Apple’s Greg Joswiak took to X earlier today to post about the new trailer Apple released for its upcoming Apple TV+ film F1. The executive, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, describes what Apple calls a “haptic trailer” as “the coolest trailer ever”—and his boastfulness is deserved. I just watched the 2:10 preview, available in the TV app on iPhone and it is incredibly cool and, dare I say, innovative.
From an accessibility perspective, applying haptic feedback to movie trailers is a genius-level move. It brings a level of access and immersion that transcends sheer coolness, as Joswiak said. To wit, someone who’s Deaf or hard-of-hearing, or Blind or low vision, could literally feel the rumble of the cars as they race around the speedway. Likewise, even for someone with typical hearing and vision, the added sensory input makes for a richer experience because, once again, a person is able to have a tactile approximation of the cars’ horsepower. When I first read about the F1 trailer, my mind immediately recalled the similar-styled Music Haptics accessibility feature Apple introduced last year in iOS 18. I wrote about Music Haptics again recently, and the advent of Apple’s novel “haptic trailer” stands not only as yet another example of potential accessibility, but of the company’s vaunted vertical integration as well.
I hope the F1 creative team appreciates how cool this technology is. Especially for people with limited hearing, if any at all, that haptics are present in the trailer makes it such that the cars’ power can be felt if not heard. This is exactly the value proposition for Music Haptics; a Deaf person, like Troy Kotsur’s Frank Rossi in CODA, can enjoy music because, as he says in the film, it “makes my ass shake.” It isn’t merely a funny, throwaway line: haptic feedback makes ostensibly exclusionary arts like music more inclusive to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. I don’t know the nitty-gritty technical details on the F1 trailer, but it’d be great to see Apple someday release a public API for App Store developers to hook into their own app(s). Imagine, for instance, sitting down to watch Star Wars on Disney+ and being able to feel explosions or the rumble of lightsabers. Haptics makes the content not only more immersive—it’s accessible too.
The Brad Pitt-led F1 opens in theaters on June 27. It’ll stream on TV+ later this year.
