i3 - January/February 2019 - 13

By Murray Slovick

Tech

A T EC H TO WATC H

Another Dimension for
Sports Fans and Athletes

Martin Sanchez/Unsplash

ixed reality (MR),
which seamlessly
blends a user's realworld environment with digitally-created content, is finding
a foothold in the sports industry, attracting new fans and
amateur athletes by harnessing
the latest digital technologies.
For example, leveraging technology
developed by Second Spectrum, Steve
Ballmer, chairman of the L.A. Clippers
NBA team, rolled out a new augmented
reality (AR) viewing experience for basketball fans on opening night of the
2018-19 NBA season at Staples Center.
Called Clippers CourtVision, the system
uses computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI) and AR to analyze the action
on the court and displays on-screen
annotations and animations as the
game unfolds. This provides fans with
as much information as they would get
from their home TV.
CourtVision offers three modes:
Mascot, Coach and Player. In Coach
Mode, fans can watch plays drawn on
the screen as they develop. Player Mode
shows real-time advanced statistics,
such as the probability of a player making a given shot. In Mascot Mode, the
system generates fun animations when a
big dunk or a three-pointer happens.
Clipper season ticket holders can also
test CourtVision's customization features, including the choice of seven different camera angles in the arena
including baseline, center court, backboard, sidelines and jumbotron.
For those not attending, Oculus
Venues launched live virtual reality
(VR) events this year, showcasing
sports games or music performances
without a subscription. And VR
C TA . t e c h / i 3

livestreaming startup NextVR is
streaming 26 NBA League Pass games
in immersive 3D via its own app, available on major headsets.

Making Practice Perfect

There are many physiological, biomechanical and psychological elements to
consider in any attempt to improve athletic performance in competitive sports.
Regardless, repetitions matter.
Coaches are finding that within a training regimen, video playback often does
not permit the in-depth analysis needed
to isolate important kinesiology factors.
Interactive, immersive VR, however, can
overcome these limitations, fostering a
better understanding of sports performance and accelerating a player's training program in a realistic environment.
This can be beneficial to back-up
players in team sports such as football.

If you assume that in any given football
practice 100 offensive snaps are taken,
most of those snaps probably will be
given to the starting quarterback, with
the second- and thirdstring players getting
much less. But by using
VR, teams can tape snaps
from different angles to
create a real-time perspective of the plays, which
they can then watch again
in virtual reality. It allows
any player to do additional mental reps during
the season.
Instead of relying on
animated or computergenerated images to simulate game-like situations,
companies such as the
Silicon Valley-based
STRIVR - which is also
using virtual reality to
train employees at
Walmart and other companies - rely on video of
each team's individual
players to create customized experiences.
STRIVR records practice plays using a
360-degree camera positioned where a
player would stand on the field, allowing
players to watch that play later using a
VR headset to get extra "virtual" reps.

Perfecting Your Shot

NEX Team Inc. is a mobile AI company
started by former Apple, Google and
Facebook engineers and employees. It
helps casual basketball players improve
their game via HomeCourt, an iPhone
app that uses AR to track and make your
basketball shot. Using only an iPhone
camera, HomeCourt can measure variables like shot trajectory, shot height,
release angle, release time, body position and number of shots made.

2019

CES 2019 See the latest sports technology at the CES Sports Zone, Located
in ARIA.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019

http://www.CES.tech https://www.cta.tech/

i3 - January/February 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of i3 - January/February 2019