By Shirish Nadkarni
As you settle down on your drawing-room sofa to watch the cricketing action in the ongoing Australia-England Ashes series, you take a sip of your coffee and gaze through your augmented reality (AR) device. Players’ names and box scores appear, and you can watch replays on demand. When your favourite player hits the opposition’s top bowler for a succession of sixes, you share the play with other fans, annotating it with visuals and selected statistics.
This seamless integration of the digital and real world is the new immersive fan experience. Immersive sports analytics, or SportsXR, will not only give fans access to real-time digital data throughout games, it will also collect and analyse in-game data, helping athletes and coaches optimise their strategy during games.
No more is sports broadcasting restricted to camerawork and commentary. Tools like digital mapping, data analytics, machine intelligence and immersive viewing are spilling over into the sports arena, sports management and sports viewing.
Among the companies that sit at the core of sports innovation, athlete optimisation and fan engagement is AWS (Amazon Web Services), provider of cloud services. AWS is promoting immersive viewing, even as they reduce costs and increase return on investment. AI and ML technologies hold the key to innovation – via real-time statistics, automation, modelling and analytics.
“The world’s top sports organisations are using AWS to build data-driven solutions and reinvent the way sports are played, managed and experienced,” said Werner Hans Peter Vogels, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer since 2005, and Vice-President in charge of driving technology innovation within the company.
“Whether it is predicting the probability of a catch in real-time or forecasting ticket sales after a winning season, technology is changing the game.
“Indeed, AWS is revolutionising the business of sports with immersive, predictive, data-driven technology.”
In the world of professional sports, predictive analytics is being used more and more as teams look to gain a competitive edge. Predictive analytics is the process of using data and statistical models to make predictions about future events or outcomes.
“In general, immersive learning allows students to explore real-world scenarios or ideas in a safe and controlled environment,” said Vogels. “This can help them learn new information more effectively and develop essential skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, teamwork and communication.
“This seamless integration of the real and digital world is the new immersive fan experience. SportsXR overlays the virtual world onto real life, and is poised to disrupt data analytics, taking professional sports decision-making to the next level.”
The collection and analysis of big data have transformed professional sports over the last decade. Many Major League Baseball (MLB), National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Football League (NFL) teams today employ in-house analytics teams that pick apart plays and tendencies to find an advantage over their opponents. They collect game data and use it to evaluate current line-ups, predict players’ performance, and adjust forthcoming game strategy.
But most data are collected through time-intensive, manual tagging of videos. This post-processing step results in low-fidelity and a time delay, especially at the college and recreational level and for many international teams.
“By incorporating advanced sensing technology, computer vision, machine learning, and data visualisation, SportsXR will bring the power of sports analytics from backroom data science experts into the hands of the wider audience of coaches, athletes, and fans, where it can have the most direct impact,” Vogels added.
To improve player performance, SportsXR will supply coaches with real-time information that enables athletes to reach their full potential. To enhance the fan experience, it will provide augmented, real-time shared data displays, making attending sports events at stadiums more engaging and customised.
“By blurring the boundary between the digital and real worlds, SportsXR has the potential to create a new sports fan culture, changing both media consumption and content creation,” Vogels said. “The opportunities for SportsXR at the intersection of sports analytics, broadcasting, mobile device applications, and augmented reality devices are tremendous.”
According to a report by B2B market research company MarketsandMarkets, the global sports technology market was valued at US$18.8 billion at end-2022, and is expected to reach $40.2 billion by the year 2026, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5%.
“In recent years, professional sports bodies have adopted new technologies such as sports data analytics, smart stadiums, wearable devices and digital signage to enhance their team performance, engage fans, provide smart infrastructures and more immersive viewing for the fans,” the report said, adding that smart stadiums are among the key global trends owing to the increase in the number of sports events being held worldwide.
In India, companies – many of them start-ups and others as large as Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra and HCL – have been offering tech-laden solutions to various functions, ranging from tracking the fitness and sporting activities of players to managing and measuring audience engagement, and using virtual reality (VR) for a richer viewing experience.
“Sports tech may still be in its infancy in India, but is fast gaining ground in line with trends abroad,” said Sanjog Gupta, CEO – Sports, with Star TV Network and Disney India. “Sporting leagues as well as players have been making use of data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and other new-age digital tools and learnings to improve performance and enrich audience engagements and tracking.”
The trend has strengthened after the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, three years ago. There has been a spurt in the sports tech area in the start-up space over the past few years, even as the larger Indian IT companies have managed to crack lucrative deals with sporting giants in top sports such as football, cricket and tennis, with sports bodies of the pedigree of Manchester United, Cricket Australia and the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP).
The set of technologies that enable SportsXR will be part of the emerging AR cloud. The AR cloud is a real-time, virtual information platform based in the real world that, just like the internet, or the Internet of Things, promises to change the way we communicate, make decisions, and consume media in a more engaging and immersive manner, at a time when the appetite for sports content remains as high as ever.
The race to embrace SportXR is on …