When it comes to the majority of sports broadcasting, it’s all about the visual. The commentators call the plays, of course, but everything you’re being shown at home is on a screen. Similarly, if you’re in the stadium, it’s all about getting the best possible view from the best seats in the house.
Ultimately, the action can be a little harder to follow for the vision impaired. However, one company is working hard to make sports more accessible to everyone. Enter OneCourt, and their haptic sports display technology.
Haptic, Fantastic
If you can see, following just about any sport is relatively straightforward. Your eyes pick out the players and the lines on the field, and you can follow the ball or puck wherever it may land. Basically, interpreting a sport is just taking in a ton of positional data—the state of the game is represented by the position of the people and the fundamental game piece involved.
But how do you represent the state of a game to somebody who can’t see? Audio helps, but it’s hard for even the fastest commentator to explain the entire state of the game all at once. As it turns out, touch can be a great tool in this regard. Imagine if you could place your hands down on a football field, and instinctively feel the position of all the players and the ball. That would be impractical, of course, because the field is too big. But if there was a small surface that represented the field in a touchable manner, that might just work.
This is precisely what OneCourt has created. The company realized that many modern professional sports already had high-quality data streams that represented the positions of players and the ball in real time. With the data on hand, they just needed a way to “display” it in a touchable, feelable form. To that end, they created a range of haptic displays that use vibrations to represent the action on the field in a compact tablet-like device. They receive game data over a 5G or WiFi link, and translate it into vibrations across a miniature replica of the playing surface.
OneCourt created a range of devices to suit different sports. A basketball version is marked out with raised lines matching those on the court, and trackable vibrations on the surface tell the user where the ball is going. The company has teamed up to offer devices to spectators going to see the Sacramento Kings and the Portland Trail Blazers at their home games throughout the season. Those visiting the stadium can request to use one of the devices during the game via guest services, and get a greater insight into the play.
The company has also demonstrated a similar device for use at baseball games, with the characteristic diamond laid out on the haptic surface. The devices were demoted at Dallas’s Glove Life Field last year.
On a technological level, the hardware appears relatively straightforward. The OneCourt devices just pack an array of vibration motors into a rectangular surface, and they’re controlled based on a feed of gamestate data already collected by the professional leagues. However, for the vision impaired, it’s a gamechanger—allowing them to independently “watch” the game in far greater detail than before.
For now, the devices are very much in a pilot rollout phase. OneCourt is running activations with individual sports teams to offer the devices to vision impaired spectators at their stadiums. However, the intention is that this technology could also be just as useful for fans tuning into a sports broadcast at home. The company hopes to start pre-orders for individual customers in the near future.
Accessible technology doesn’t always have to be highly advanced or complicated to be useful—or, indeed, fun! Devices like these can open up a whole new world of perception to those that otherwise might find sports difficult or frustrating to follow. Ultimately, that’s a good thing—and something we hope to see more of in future!
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