NEW YORK — Have you ever been curious about how it feels to be hit by an NFL linebacker? Or how hard it is to complete a pass to a receiver? Have you ever wanted to know exactly what goes on between the quarterback and his coach before every play? And what the cryptic names assigned to plays actually signify?
Well, you’re in luck.
The NFL in partnership with Cirque du Soleil opened on Friday the NFL Experience Times Square, an interactive look inside football that, in the words of NFL Experience President Danny Boockvar, takes you from fan to player to champion using a combination of high-tech installations and “low-tech” displays.
“It was a strategy, and that said — first of all, there’s a narrative: fan to player to champion, and I like that and I think that really serves us well,” Boockvar said. Virtual reality is deliberately left mostly out of the experience.
The NFL Experience seems to be the natural extension of previous, event-based efforts to create a lasting culture around the NFL product. It also represents an opportunity for the NFL to keep fans involved throughout the year, especially from the Super Bowl to Kickoff weekend eight months later. For Dawn Hudson, the NFL’s chief marketing officer, the NFL Experience also gives the league a way to create other exhibitions around the world that further fans’ engagement with the NFL.
“What it gave us a flavor for is we can build more things that give people different ways to interact with our brand — experiences, if you will…,” Hudson said in a phone interview. “The NFL’s really good about creating a calendar of events; we were really focused on, for this project and for others, how do we create things in between, other ways people can interact?”
The Experience
You begin on the fourth floor with an opportunity to take a picture on a green screen with Gatorade being poured on you as if you won the Super Bowl. From there, a video teaches the basics of football; if you’re already well-versed in the game but want to find out more about its teams and history, a number of touch screens can deliver that info. Authentic memorabilia is placed throughout the exhibition floor.
For those who already know the game well, the fourth floor might take a back seat to the more interactive elements further along. But the NFL’s first truly permanent fan-centric space is likely geared more toward the American and international tourists who account for half of Times Square’s foot traffic.
“You’ve got 66 million people coming in across the street, many of whom — you know, we have 100 million NFL fans, 5 percent of whom have ever been to a game,” Boockvar mentioned. “Plus all the internationals who have seen Lady Gaga at the Super Bowl or maybe they’ve had one game in London, they’re going to come in here and be like, ‘Wow, I get it, I understand what it’s like to step into the game, step into the eyes of the player.'”
From the fourth floor, you enter a 180-seat 4D theater that immerses you completely in the life of an NFL player. NFL Films provided real game footage that was synced with sensory seating by D-Box to mimic the feel of a tackle; wind and falling snow; and powerful audio to nearly mimic the feel of being on the field. Boockvar, and other officials SportTechie spoke with, compared the experience to Disney World.
NFL Films, 4U2C, and D-Box worked in almost perfect cohesion to ensure that the theater was ready, Boockvar explained, despite the difficulties of installing a theater and control room, and installing fiber optic cable, in an active construction zone in the heart of one of NYC’s busiest tourist spots.
“It’s been a collaboration between 4U2C, which is part of Cirque du Soleil, and NFL Films, so NFL came up with the idea of the actual video itself all out of their archives, so it’s got a very realistic style,” Tim Durant, 4U2C’s (unsure of position), told SportTechie. “And then we’re a design company, through technology and video, so we helped build that into an immersive experience based on what NFL Films had.”
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The Interaction
On the third floor, you enter into an “equipment room” with a number of physical challenges calling your name. Want to assess your strength against NFL standards? Attack a blocking dummy and see if your force output is All-Pro-caliber. Been envisioning yourself as an NFL player forever? Stand in front of a screen that uses Xbox Kinect technology to detect your body and overlay your favorite team’s uniform—now you are one.
Next, learn an actual play call from a hologram of Super Bowl-winning coach Jon Gruden, who explains the motions behind “Dice Right 61 Bullseye X Individual.” Then go under the hood and into the huddle to call the play and get the ball to a receiver. An embedded microphone picks up your play call and prompts you to hike the ball. Complete all three passes? You’re the starter.
“The huddle-up with Gruden, where we created that custom video game, we made a purposeful choice not to do computer-generated images,” Boockvar said. “We filmed real people — tight ends and wide receivers — running Dice Right 61 Bullseye, X Individual, so then we created a video game, and you pick the tight end and wide receiver. That’s awesome. That doesn’t exist (anywhere else).”
Finally, grab a football, choose your team, and again try to complete throws to your receiver under the pressure of time, much like NFL quarterbacks do when they drop back to pass. Complete even one pass, and touchdown it is. QB Challenge, as this final interactive is called, also measures your accuracy and speed using vertical and horizontal sensors that track your throw.
“The technology and the interactives and all that, it’s all about supporting the storyline. So you’re a fan, you become a player, you train, you suit up, you go to the coach, the coach is going to teach you a play or two, and then you implement those plays…,” Francois Bergeron, the COO/CFO of Thinkwell, which helped design the NFL Experience, said during the tour. “Every piece of equipment is supporting that storyline.”
The Championship Feeling
Descend the stairs to the next level and now you’re a Super Bowl Champion. Stand in front of a screen to see yourself in augmented reality enjoying the confetti-covered celebration. Next, examine the tickets from every Super Bowl ever played, or gaze at a real Lombardi Trophy. If you’re a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, admire all six championship rings among the 52 currently in existence.
The Super Bowl display resonated deeply with a particular New York Giants wide receiver: “Brandon Marshall was here (Tuesday), and he said, ‘I’m so inspired to get back in the game,'” Boockvar said excitedly. “If this can inspire a player, it will inspire the fans to step into the shoes of the player.”
“The benefit of the space like the NFL Experience Times Square versus the Super Bowl Experience is that it’s fixed, so you can put more technology into it that you couldn’t afford – it wouldn’t work to take it on the road,” Hudson said. “You also have more space limitations, so what you might do when you allow people to run the dash or try to kick a field goal, you don’t have the space for in New York. So you’ve gotta create other ways and you have to use technology to give people the sense of scale of football while being in a relatively small space.”
The exhibition ends on the second floor into the souvenir shop and café, where a number of vendors offer featured items from the menus at all 32 NFL stadiums; during the season, weekly matchups determine which teams’ food — the ingredients are locally sourced from their home cities — is available. Grab a bite and look out over Times Square.
Or better yet, have a seat at the bar on a Sunday, watch a game, and realize that maybe your time at the NFL Experience brought you that much closer to the action on the field.