The smart implementation of AR could change how soccer fans watch the beautiful game from home.
Soccer is – by number alone – the most popular sport in the world with a staggering 3.5 billion fans across the globe. And although fans can’t beat the thrill of witnessing football live in the stadium seeing your favourite stars in person, the majority of people have to make do with watching football at home on that same old familiar flat screen.
However, the soccer watching experience could potentially be a whole lot more immersive as a result of Guillaume Chican – Sporttotal’s Head of Immersive Technologies – who uploaded a video to YouTube showcasing their AR capabilities and how their tech can change (and hopefully improve) the way football fans watch the beautiful game at homes.
The video shows an ongoing match playing on the TV while a board below the screen, in real 3D space shows a simultaneous 3D-rendered bird’s eye view of the match. The 3D-rendered players playing on the board are rendered in real time and in sync with the match that’s showing on the TV.
Check this out! Video on the TV screen in sync with the mocap data on the tabletop.🤯🤯Whoa!
Start your project here> https://t.co/6c8ITiwqTa
follow Guillaume Chican’s youtube channel for more:https://t.co/yOxsP9VUTR pic.twitter.com/LpaRJ1yio7
— Tilt Five (@tiltfive) October 17, 2022
The team were able to achieve this via Tilt Five, a holographic gaming table device that consists of a plain board, controller and of course, AR glasses. With the aforementioned setup, individuals can view apps on the plain board using the AR glasses and interact with the apps with the controller.
The idea is commendable and is similar to The Soccer On Your Tabletop demo produced as part of research previously presented by the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City. This tech similarly aims to track each player on the pitch and their movements then map the images of the players onto 3D models “extracted from soccer video games,” placed on a 3D representation of the field ready to enjoy via augmented reality headsets.
Ultimately, the whole idea is far from perfect and the small matter of the ball itself not being visible is not so much a game-changer as a deal-breaker… Still, AR tech and the realtime interpretation of moment and 3D rendering is a great start towards becoming more immersed in the sports we love.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
