The BackPage Weekly | Turning Sporting Dreams into a Virtual Reality
On 17 February 2023, NBA[1] Commissioner Adam Silver revealed a futuristic broadcasting option for viewers of the league’s matches on its League Pass app which could yet have significant implications for the way live sport broadcasts are viewed in future.
🏀 A new way of watching
A recap of the unveiling can be seen in the video below.
Briefly, at an event during the league’s recent All Star Weekend festivities, Silver took a 3D body scan of long-time NBA reporter and close friend of Michael Jordan, Ahmad Rashad, using his mobile phone. Silver then generated an avatar of Rashad, resumed a live broadcast of an NBA game being shown on the league’s app and superimposed Rashad’s avatar on the body of a player within the game.
As the next play in the game unfolded, Rashad’s avatar (admittedly looking slightly out of place on the court in his street clothes) rebounded the ball from a missed shot, raced down the court and slam dunked the ball over an onrushing defender – Rashad’s tongue wagging in mid-air in Jordan’s trademark fashion. Rashad’s avatar then proceeded to stare down the vanquished defender and enthusiastically chest-bumped a real-life teammate.
It should be said that the technology is not without its limits. Rashad’s avatar, even disregarding its clothing, was noticeably different to the real-life players it was ostensibly sharing a floor with; looking obviously computer generated with stiffer movement than its real-life counterparts. Notwithstanding this, it was an incredibly impressive demonstration, and one which raises a spectrum of questions.
🏀 What’s the use case?
Some viewers of the video will have thought, ‘Wow. That was kind of cool. But who is this for? The target audience for it must be small and the novelty must wear off pretty quickly’.
However, similar questions will have been asked about the now ubiquitous ‘create-a-player’ modes in sports video games in their infancy. Some will maintain that video game simulated sport will never offer the same experience(s) as playing the sport yourself. Yet sport simulation titles are consistently among the most popular video game releases each year and gamers who stream their virtual sporting exploits are among some of the most watched and therefore well-remunerated content creators.
So, in the same vein, could there be a not-too-distant future in which viewers routinely superimpose avatars of themselves into live or near-live sporting contests? The trend in sports broadcasting of introducing ever greater degrees of interactivity for viewers in real time, from enabling the selection of broadcast angles or cameras (like spidercam) to customising their view of the action with different graphic overlays.
The NBA’s demonstration went viral on social media, being viewed on league’s official Instagram account alone 12.7 million times and liked by over 900,000 accounts. Reposts and retweets from other accounts including broadcast partners and news outlets like ESPN and Sports Illustrated will have amplified the reach of the video manyfold.
Could the ‘use-case’ expand beyond that, to allow users of social media to create and shared videos of themselves and others for all manner of purposes, like GIFs in instant message conversations or virtual greeting cards? Further still, is there world in which predominantly younger audiences – for whom gaming is a genuine alternative to live sports content and the metaverse is just another locale – view simulated or virtually augmented sports as a viable alternative to real-life sport?
Further still, is there world in which predominantly younger audiences – for whom gaming is a genuine alternative to live sports content and the metaverse is just another locale – view simulated or virtually augmented sports as a viable alternative to real-life sport?
Ultimately, the interplay between the real and virtual experiences are increasingly fluid, and initiatives such as this are a further step through which sports rightsholders are seeking to target, engage and retain a younger demographic audience and ‘meeting them’ in spaces that are familiar (namely ones that are gamified, interactive and immersive).
📺 Simulated Reality
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, rather than run replays of past contests ad nauseam, some content providers turned to simulated sports. Sportradar, one of the world’s leading the sports data companies, launched Simulated Reality; a package of virtual sports including football, cricket and tennis powered by data the company’s vast bank of data collected from real life contests in each of those sports. As Sportradar’s Chief Information Officer Ian Poland notes:
“We had all the elements to create simulated sports. Our vast array of sports data and videos, combined with our AI and machine learning capabilities, provided the key ingredients.”
This meant that its customers were able to enjoy, for example, full ninety-minute football matches or twenty20 cricket matches on-demand and at their convenience. Sportradar’s offering proved so compelling and popular with its customers that it still offers Simulated Reality football, cricket and tennis matches notwithstanding that their real-world equivalents have returned with few (if any) covid related restrictions. Reflecting on Simulated Reality’s success, Poland said:
“It exploded. The uptake was instant, and we saw rapid growth that led to an extension of the coverage of additional leagues. At a time when little or no live sport was taking place, our customers really appreciated having a new sports betting product. Simulated Reality has endured since sport returned as the COVID cessation and continues to provide our clients with alternative options to live sport.”
🔮 The future?
It may ultimately prove to be little more than a short-lived viral sensation. However, one cannot quite dismiss the possibility that Silver’s demonstration heralded the arrival of something – if not of a new era then of yet another consumable in the already well stocked entertainment market – which empowers consumers to be creators and creates engagement and interaction through combining the real and virtual worlds..
It is the stuff of daydreams – scoring a last gasp free-kick to take your country to a World Cup or hitting the winning runs in a test match. But technology is now available to turn those dreams into a virtual reality and it will be fascinating to watch how that exciting virtual reality co-exists with plain old reality.
[1] National Basketball Association