Institute For The Future

Feeling The Rush

THE AMPLIFIED FAN

In 2012, extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner made history in two ways: he broke the world record for the highest skydive and set the world record for the largest number of video streams, with 8 million live viewers.

Wearable Experiments created this jersey that links fans with the
Dutch Ladies 7’s Rugby team. (Photo courtesy of Billie Whitehouse /
Wearable Experiments)

To get Baumgartner up and down safely, a team of scientists measured the full body intensity of the experience. His stress levels, breathing and heart rate, and numerous other details were captured and shared with his scientific team. Viewers saw nothing more than the visuals. Watching him jump, they could only imagine the knot in his stomach, the force of the wind on his body. But that’s about to change. In a few short years, viewers will be able to feel it.

As we rapidly adopt body area networks, entertaining and engaging viewers will move from the two-dimensional images we see on screens to become immersive, social, full-body experiences that better connect fans to their favorite athletes—and to one another.

The tools to create these kinds of experiences are being built from biosensing devices that capture the physical and emotional intensity of games and athletic experiences— and actuators to communicate them.

BEYOND THE SCREEN: wearing the game on your sleeves

When it comes to developing sports wearables, the goal is largely better data and statistical measures for sports teams and fans alike—but the result will be better spectator experiences. At least that’s the vision of companies like Wearable Experiments—and early products like their Alert Shirt. Designed to enhance the experiences of rugby fans, and working with a companion app called FoxTel that collects and transmits data feeds, the shirt transforms that data into physical sensations that flow through haptic feedback motors. An anxious moment produces a tightening sensation; a tackle creates a physical rumble in the chest. Adrenaline, exhaustion, and excitement all get communicated. As Billie Whitehouse, Wearable Experiments’ founder and chief designer, describes the shirt, “The emotions [of a game] played out in the chest of a fan’s jersey.”

Companies like SportRadar are at the vanguard of the perpetual effort to better measure athletic performance. In 2015 they signed a four-year partnership with the NFL to outfit players with accelerometers, RFID chips, and other sensors to precisely track each individual player’s speed, acceleration, and mobility for each individual play.

The major difference between athletic programming and other entertainment is simple: sports is an event. A shared experience. And we’re about to get a lot better at sharing experiences. Fanmode is looking to reinvent the fan experience by giving distant viewers the ability to cheer their teams as if they were there. A simple app with swipe controls to cheer and boo, Fanmode aims to turn isolated fans into a co-present community. Their goal is to take the sentiment data of the fans using their app—the excitement, the anger—and display it in signs in stadiums to let a lone fan cheering at a television from home send applause into the stadium.

Taken together, Fanmode and Wearable Experiments suggest an intriguing future for spectator sports: You probably won’t be able to attend the Super Bowl in person in 2025, but you’ll feel the excitement and send your applause just like you were there.

FROM TV TO STREAMING: fandom in the age of peer-to-peer media

As major sports leagues have flourished, we’ve also witnessed the sudden rise in recent years of entirely new kinds of athletes. Perhaps none more startling than the rise of video games as a spectator competition, as witnessed through companies like Twitch. Twitch, which didn’t exist until 2011, is home to more than 1.5 million live videogame streamers, who are watched by more than 100 million fans every month. The average viewer spends 90 minutes on Twitch—every single day.

Phrases like “streams” and “viewer” don’t quite capture the experience of fandom. Twitch streams are interactive; fans chat with each other over text while gamers wear headsets and talk as they play. Twitch, and services like it, have taken off in part because they bring community to the once solitary activity of playing video games. Adding technologies like the Alert Shirt to enhance the experience is an intuitive next step.

It makes perfect sense that sports are driving these changes. The last decade was marked by a shift away from shared media and experiences. Newspapers gave way to blogs; blockbuster movies gave way to YouTube; television gets consumed on-demand. But even as this shift has taken place and the value of shared, static reality has declined, the value of one type of live programming—of shared reality—has skyrocketed. Sports, the ability to share the highs, lows, and emotions of watching a game with others, is worth more than ever. Indeed, ESPN’s subscription fees are more than four times the cost of the second most valuable cable channel.

In the next decade, entertainment and fandom will move beyond the constraints of the screen and become an embodied, multisensory experience that we share in real-time with fans all over the world.