Virtual and augmented reality took center stage at this year’s SXSports event in Austin, where audience members were shown demonstrations on how the technology is being used in sports.
The differences between augmented and virtual reality are significant. Augmented reality is when information is overlaid onto a clear visor. Think about a fighter pilot’s cockpit or Google Glass. Virtual reality is the complete immersion of the user. Right now that means wearing goggles or a helmet that puts you into a 360 degree virtual world.
At the Tech That’s Changing Sports and Building Empathy SXSports panel, Chris Kluwe and Derek Belch discussed how AR and VR could be used as advantages in sports.
Kluwe, a former NFL punter for the Vikings, said that augmented reality can be installed into NFL player’s helmets within the next two to three years.
“As cell phones migrate to visual sensor, like Google Glass, you can interpret the information and make it useful,” Kluwe said. “Clear plastic visors can be installed into football helmets. Plays will pop up right in front of the players and they will already know what they have to do. Now they just need to react.”
.@ChrisWarcraft talking augmented reality in sports at #sxsports pic.twitter.com/WKsW0BtgrL
— SportTechie (@SportTechie) March 14, 2015
Virtual reality is already being used. Derek Belch, an assistant football coach for Stanford’s football team, explained that Stanford uses virtual reality to review plays and give their players a break from the field. “We see it in high school, over-exertion and decreased participation,” Belch said. “Using virtual reality will give the players a break from two-a-days and help them mentally prepare for situations.”
Another advantage of using virtual and augmented reality is empathy.
“On the field, everything is chaos. We have little sense of what is going on,” Kluwe said. “AR and VR will help us see why the player didn’t make the play as if we were in his shoes.” The panel members of Acing the Sports Game with Oculus Rift had similar things to say about the uses of virtual reality in soccer. Robert Overweg, lead concept and innovation at Triple IT, said that coaches, players and fans can empathize with other players when they make a poor decision.
“We can understand why a player missed a penalty kick,” Overweg said. “We can measure the stress levels of that player using virtual reality.”
Both panels featured virtual reality demos. At the Tech that’s Changing Sports and Building Empathy panel, Derek Belch showed off a virtual reality headset that Stanford created for their football team. The headset used prerecorded footage to let players run through routes. Users who wore the virtual reality headset in the conference room had the feeling they were standing on Stanford’s practice field. They could look around the field by moving their head. Belch would control the plays through his computer and could even move the user to a different position on the field. To make things even more immersive, headphones accompanied the headset and provided on-field audio.
At the Acing the Sports Game with Oculus Rift panel, audience members were given cardboard cutouts with specialized lenses. They downloaded a Beyond Sports app on their phones and placed it in front of the cardboard cutouts. They were transported into a video game like soccer pitch. The panel members from Triple IT ran through plays where the audience members could see animated soccer figures running around them.
It ended up being a fascinating and awkward presentation that had people turned around in their chairs facing audience members behind them just to keep track of the ball in the virtual world.
Our cardboards look amazing! Come to our #sxsports panel on Virtual Reality in sports Saturday at 12:30 to try! #sxsw pic.twitter.com/yUZ72s4vQ1 — Jordi Bruin (@jordibruin) March 13, 2015
The amounts of data that virtual reality and augmented reality headsets measure help predict performance and emphasize areas that need work. The simulations give players the chance to reenact exact copies of plays that happen on the field.
But there are still problems with the technology. The biggest problem with augmented reality is that, at least on a large scale, it is still in its infancy. And there are health concerns with virtual reality. According to Belch, players only wear the headset for 30 minutes at a time, and Overweg says that players are not capable of keeping the headset on for the duration of a soccer match due to disorientation. Research into the effects of virtual reality are limited. According to Kluwe, we do not know long term implications of using virtual reality. And while both AR and VR are becoming less expensive, only the richer programs can afford to use them.
However, the advantages of this technology go far beyond sports.
“Virtual reality can help us become more civilized. We could turn you into someone of a different race or gender for a day, and see how it makes you feel,” Kluwe thoughtfully said. “We put people into a virtual world and told them to cut down a tree. 80 percent of those people thought twice about buying non-recycled paper products the next day.”