AUSTIN, TEXAS – Imagine you were shrunk to a tiny version of yourself and plopped onto a drone. You take hold of the controllers and begin speeding around objects at 80 miles per hour as though you’re piloting a Star Wars fighter dodging intergalactic enemy ships.
This is what it’s like to be a first-person-view drone pilot, and it’s one of the many new sports that have been born out of advances in video technology. Many of these sports are at the convergence of traditional sports and video games, but don’t confuse them with esports.
Video-enabled sports, such as drone racing, intermix the digital and physical worlds in a way that esports do not by implementing physical gameplay alongside the video technology that’s crucial to their existence. They are part of an entire new category of sport altogether, something early adopters of video sports are referring to as “vsports.”
“It seems like everything is converging in the middle,” Marty Wetherall, cofounder of Hydra FPV, a drone racing entertainment technology company, said at a panel discussing vsports at South by Southwest. “We’ve had real sports and we’ve had video games. These brand new sports are not purely computer code (like esports). They have that added engagement of real life.”
With drone racing, fans can see the exact real-time view as the pilots, who wear virtual reality-like glasses that give them a first-person-view from the standpoint of the drone. Because the obstacle course is in the real world, however, fans can simultaneously switch between both perspectives. They can be in the game watching as though they’re piloting the drones themselves, or they can be outside of it watching drones zip around the physical track.
“They can’t fly at these speeds and go in and out of these obstacles without knowing left is left and right is right and being perfectly situated,” said Wetherall, whose company has been hosting scaled-down drone racing events at bars to introduce people to the potential of this technology. “You’ve got a sport that wouldn’t be possible without the video camera baked into the equipment…and all of a sudden you have a racing sport.”
Drone racing, the high-adrenaline racing sport that’s being powered by companies such as the Drone Racing League, is just one example of a vsport. Other examples include fan-controlled football leagues, which have been likened to “real world Madden,” drone-enabled aerial ballplay being developed by a company called Flynoceros that has been likened to “real life Quidditch” (from Harry Potter), and location-based virtual reality games where the gameplay takes place on physical courses, such as Modal VR, created by the founder of Atari.
“I think we’ve settled on that term [vsport] as a collective because it’s very hard to describe what we’re doing right now,” said Josh Ingram, the founder of Flynoceros. “It’s not augmented reality, but it is. It’s not virtual reality, but it is. It’s all of these things combined. It’s all about integrating that camera in a new way to play sports.”
Flynoceros is developing custom drone accessories that one day might enable sports such as aerial soccer, where there are teams of drone pilots playing ball sports on three dimensional fields.
Of these vsports, the Fan-Controlled Football League is probably the most reminiscent of a traditional sport, with real-life football players throwing actual footballs toward physical endzones. But it too wouldn’t exist without advances in video technology. The league places cameras around the field and on the players themselves to livestream gameplay on its app and through Twitch, where fans can control the plays in real time as though they’re playing Madden.
“When it comes down to specifically making decisions and having control of what’s going on on the field, we couldn’t do what we do without streaming video,” said Jason Chilton, Head of Football Experience at FANchise, the parent company of the Fan-Controlled Football League. “It’s a great example of what I think is going to be a big wave of the future: embedding interactivity into your streaming sports experience.”
None of these early innovators in vsports think that this new tech-enabled category of sports will replace existing sports. Rather, they expect that video technology will enhance traditional sports by making them more interactive. They envision a future in which vsports can stand on their own, similar to how esports have ballooned and demanded the attention of traditional sports owners.
“All the major sports that we’ve grown up with are going to start using video in different ways,” said Wetherall. “I don’t know that these new sports that were born out of the video ubiquity are going to replace all of them, but we’ll just have more things to choose from.”