Sport and VR: A Match Made in Heaven?
Few things can beat the roar of a sports stadium when the crowd comes alive; the overwhelming emotion, the bass you can actually feel. It’s absolutely tribal, and does something very guttural to you that people that don’t go to live sporting events will be hard pushed to experience elsewhere.
This alone makes a strong argument that physically attending a sporting event is the best way to experience one, but a step back from the glamour of stadiums, and a fair argument could be made for the armchair experience; especially when you throw VR in to the mix.
When you picture yourself attending your favourite teams latest match, you might imagine them scoring a last minute winner and the crowd exploding into thousands of raised arms and battered vocals. What you won’t picture is the 21st century hell of trying to find a place to park your car, or the cramped seating at the stadium, or missing the goal because you couldn’t make out the ball from hundreds of feet away, or the extortionate prices for a hotdog there, or, heaven forbid, the walk of shame to the exit if your team lose.
It almost feels like treason to talk negatively about seeing your team in the flesh, because without the crowds, the games are hollow shells. However, compare the experience attending the game to watching it from your couch at home.
No need to worry about parking, since you’re already at home. Your couch is much comfier than the plastic at the stadiums. Cutting edge HD cameras capture each touch from hundreds of different angles, so you’ll never miss a goal. Not to mention, nothing beats putting your feet up and cracking open a beer as your favourites win!
This has been the case for years, and will be for years to come. However, one device looks to shake this up. Actually, a few devices.
Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Playstation VR, HTC Vive are all fighting for the real estate of your face. To quote Oculus, the company seen as the forerunner of this tech after a very public investment from Mark Zuckerberg, they think these VR devices…
“…[will] radically redefine digital entertainment. Immerse yourself in games or go inside your favorite movies. Time travel, space travel, or hang out with friends in VR.”
Their bark is big then, and the buzz from press so far is that the bite of the tech matches up to it.
However, in these formative years of the devices, their true potential won’t be met yet. It might be limited to video games or primitive (in the way the original iPhone looks primitive now, but was the hottest tech in the world at the time) experiences as of now, but in five or ten years, it could revolutionise some of our biggest industries.
You could simulate tests in the aerodynamics industry, practice complex brain surgeries without the need of physical patients, step onto the surface of Mars as if you were there; the fabled sci-fi authors of our past would be geeking out pretty heavily.
Sports fans don’t have time to care about the future though; a 12 year old wonderkid doesn’t mean squat for the weekends game. It’s great that we’ve got companies like Laduma and Beyond Sports then, that are dragging the future kicking and screaming to our doorstep.
Beyond Sports have already been recognised by the big names, as the Netherlands national team trialled one of the Dutch companies systems for the 2014 World Cup. Using their technology, they could replay specific moments from a match, and would then have to make a decision in the moment to pass/shoot/run/etc.
This tests their decision making ability much more accurately than just a hypothetical question, and the ability to replay the situation with simulated circumstances means that they don’t need team members to stand around on the field; replaced with animated footballers instead.
When you look at sports like American Football too, that is plagued with concussion injuries, you start to realise how important this tech could be.
However, as fascinating as all that is, it doesn’t mean much to us sports fans that are never going to play for the Netherlands national team (I’m sorry, but we’d love it if you proved us wrong!). This consumer-side is where Laduma come in.
As Beyond Sports proved, the potential of this tech for the sports industry isn’t limited to hypotheticals and wonderment, and Laduma proved in Wimbledon earlier this year that the revolution is already knocking on the door.
Taking their cameras behind the scenes, they offered a 360-degree view of the tournament from areas the eyes of the public were never previously meant for. Over in America, they did something similar with the soccer outfit LA Galaxy, as they offered people a look at their multi-million pound facilities from the comfort of their sofa.
It is this faux-teleportation act that will have fans of every sport under the sun salivating. While they only offer moments as of now, the ability to watch football/basketball/rugby/ultimate frisbee/Quidditch matches in full, with a 360-degree viewing field isn’t a pipedream; it’s a soon-to-be-realised reality. The experts predict we could be watching our favourite teams playing in this semi-Matrix in just a few years, although a product this revolutionary will no doubt be hidden behind a paywall.
This could be the biggest change to sport fan consumption since the internet. Foreign fans can visit their stadium and watch from their favourite stands, essentially knocking down the geographical barriers that have limited fans for decades. Disabled or bed-bound fans will be able to easily step into their childhood ground and experience the match with no physical barriers.
The comfort of the armchair experience meets the guttural thrill of the stadium experience. Sure, healthcare advancements will be handy, but this is dream made physical. This is the future. This is VR.
If all this has you in the mood to break a sweat yourself, we think we can help. Our Hoops app can help connect people with yoga classes, Zumba partners, gym sessions, football matches, basketball players; you name it! We hated not being able to play our favorite sports because none of our friends played them, or not being able to find yoga classes easily. So, we started Hoops.
You can sign up for our private beta here, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, *breathe*, LinkedIn, Medium and even on Spotify. We’re everywhere, and hopefully we’ll be on your phone soon enough, too!
