(2018)Annual Immersive Tech in Sports & Entertainment Summit.
Last week in San Francisco between November 13th and 14th was the Sports Innovation Network 2nd annual immersive technology summit.
The event showcased the latest innovations from some cutting edge companies in the space of traditional sport, e-sport and fantasy sport using technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality, as well as social and big data management platforms.
The event was co-sponsored by Verizon 5G among a host of other lucrative presenters and sponsors from companies such as Intel, Microsoft just to name a few.
A number of sports franchises appeared at the conference to investigate some of the emerging technologies that were changing ‘the game’ or the way fans engage with sports entertainment.
From NASCAR to NFL, E-sport to Olympics there were many innovations on show which are set to change the way people consume and interact with sports entertainment.
Primary to the event was the idea of technology enabling richer customer experiences for sporting events. Verizon 5G Lab was excited to host and witness some of the VR, AR and location based mobile technologies that could best utilize their upcoming 5G network.
Prior to the summit itself a list of top startups were selected from around North America and also globally from countries such as China, Italy and Israel to participate in a pitch competition in front of up to 60 lucrative venture capital organizations and executives from Silicon Valley.
Our project PASSBoards made it through as a top 10 finalist among such a prestigious group of funded startups most of whom have been developing commercial solutions for a few years, and had significant traction in their niche markets for the type of technology they had developed.
For PASSBoards ‘a pre-seed startup company out of the #Rustbelt, Detroit and Cleveland’ it was a big deal just to be part of this group and the experience to pitch in front of such an amazing group of investors.
We came away from this event with many potential leads to form partnerships and integrate our solution into Verizon 5G as one of their platform partners. A number of other companies also expressed how our solution when refined and developed for its desired markets could add value to sports entertainment.
As I write this article from a personal perspective, a big thanks and a lot of gratitude goes out to Verizon 5G Labs / and Verizon Investments, Sports Innovation Network, Yahoo, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Wavework, all the represented companies, the sports franchises such as NFL, NBA, NHL, Olympics, PGA, NASCAR, and media networks such as FOX Sports, and CBS.
The summit itself introduced many different experiential technologies from using Augmented Reality within sports like Golf to using racing simulators in NASCAR to train future drivers.
In addition Intel showed how True VR and VR 360 platforms could create immersive experiences within live sports events. Among some of newer ideas was remote racing using artificial intelligence from companies such as Robo-Race and AR to track golf ball trajectory among other information from startups such as EdgyBees.
Managing information and creating customer experiences using social platforms was also something of great interest where solutions such as Wavework presented how to organize and distribute information and offer premium year round services to sports fans.
Among the hot topics at the conference was also e-sport and how this is changing the consumption of sports as its market grows by an average of 2.5 billion dollars yearly. Several technologies focused on e-sport using VR but it is hard to say when some of these technologies could be considered as market ready platforms.
One thing stands out from summits and conferences such as this one and also the mixed reality marketing summit which was a week earlier in New York, the adoption of immersive technology, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, big data and 5G in every commercial vertical imaginable is not far away.
Within 5 years how we consume and interact with information and how younger audiences choose to engage with each other will be very different from communication as it is now and as it has been in the past. With this said the wireless industry will also face transformation significantly where the immersive technology products will likely change from mobile devices to wearable devices as innovation improves.
Thanks again Verizon 5G Innovation Labs, Verizon Investments and Sports Innovation Network and also all of the other sponsors and hosts of the event.
By Neil S on November 18, 2018.
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Exported from Medium on January 10, 2020.
