TECHNOLOGY IN SPORTS

Internet of Things is a rising technology that is slowly taking a bigger part of our daily activities, but it isn’t yet accepted by everyone and developed to it’s full potential. I read an article the other day about the 2017 SuperBowl (on vcloud news) that explained how Intel improved the experience of this worldwide sports event using new technologies. This had me thinking, what is the full potential (with what we have nowadays) of technology in sports? Using data analysis platforms and connecting people and objects through IoT, we can enhance the experience of a sports event and change the way we see and live sports.

I believe that the first step we can take is making spectators’ experiences better. To better explain my opinion on this topic I will put the example of a hypothetical Champions League Finals.

To start off, I want you to imagine yourself watching a soccer match: the fans cheering, the players fighting to win, the coaches yelling, the crowd awaiting and the whole stadium roaring with excitement. It is a great experience to be able to go see a game in person, but it has lot’s of inconveniences too. You can often not see well the players or the ball far away, you cannot pause the game to rewatch a play, you Have to wait long and tiring lines to get food or even divide your attention because you are nervous that you don’t know if the person who came with you is lost looking for the bathroom and is about to miss a goal.

All the examples are situations in which you don’t have something. This can easily fixed with a bit of technology. If any of you have ever played FIFA, you know that it is easier to follow the game because there is a small arrow above the player that has the ball. How can we transfer this to a real life game? There are new gadgets like Microsoft Hololens that enable us to live added reality (not the same as virtual reality). If we connect those to internet or the cloud, where you can access information captured by sensors in nanoseconds, could watch the game and above the player see their name, an arrow above the one that has the ball and even make the ball itself more visible. This is only a tiny bit of what added reality can do, but I’ll let you think of the millions of possibilities that this technology offers us.

On the other hand, imagine if during the game anyone wants to rewatch a play and you could just open your phone and see it. With the ticket you bought, you could get a link to an internet platform in which you have access live videos of the game, you could choose a play and repeat it, in case you missed any details. We can solve the food and getting lost problems with one simple act, connected to sensors and GPS signals. If the stadium provides us with a digital map, we can locate food courts and bathrooms quickly, not only looking at an interactive map, but also with added reality, you can see easy directions and instructions wherever you look.

But, do we have to stop there? Can we only limit ourselves to solving the “can’ts”?

We can do so much more. If sensors are installed inside the bathrooms, each spectator could decide to go to when it is available and not loose time waiting in the queue. If you could order the food you want and just go pick it up when it is ready you could be efficient and also have access to the full variety of food options and decide calmly. You could see more than just the players’ names with added reality. What if you could see their goals, faults, probabilities, speeds, and even backgrounds, all this while you are watching the game? If you want to rewatch a play, you could pause, rewind, put in slow motion, see every player’s exact position and more.

Not only can we make the experience during the game better, we can also help fans before and after. For example, what they modeled in the Super Bowl, was a system to coordinate millions of Uber users, in a safe and quick way to get to the stadium and back home. For all those loyal fans that travel from outside the host city, you can have access to platforms that show prices of planes and hotels, specific to the match, as well as connect you to people close to you that share your passion for sports and might have a similar background. This is only the beginning to a shallow train of thought on ideas on how to help spectators have an even better experience at a match

But spectators aren’t only those people that go to the stadium, they are the millions of fans sitting at home, having pizza at a friends’ or ordering a beer at a bar. We can now enable these people to experience the game in a more realistic way. At home we have the results, statistics, strategies and replays, but not the environment or the stadium itself. So why not take them to the stadium from their couch. We have virtual or added reality that could either take you virtually to the stadium, or recreate the stadium through holograms. thanks to the millions of sensors that are transmitting the information quickly to the cloud, where it is analyzed and organized, people can watch it like streaming live: just as it is happening. So don’t worry about spoilers.

So, going back to my first question, what is the full potential of technology in sports? Regarding the spectators’ experience we can only begin to imagine how a soccer match could be in the future. First we solve those minor inconveniences that watching a live game has, but we also expand and enrich the experience by adding gadgets, apps and millions of possibilities. The technology is almost ready, if it isn’t ready yet, to be put into use. What we need are innovative and creative ideas. This is only the tip of the iceberg, a small amount of ideas focused on one sport.

It is essential that we recognize all the incredible we can do with technology and how it is up to us to keep developing crazy and amazing ideas.

In future posts, I will be discussing the impact of these technologies on players and teams and also on companies and the financial issues they face. But until then:

Imagine what we could do with technology in sports if we only stopped to brainstorm…