The Virtual World of Esports

It was the year 2016. You are taking a nice brisk stroll through your favorite park. You are listening to the birds sing and watching the squirrels run back and forth from tree to tree. Your eyes are diverted to a group of teens running to various places in the park holding their phones as if they were Tricorders and they were performing a Star Trek enactment. “I’ve got one!” “I found one here!” “Darn, Zubat! Come back here!” You have read about the phenomenon. No, I am not referring to Sudden Teenage Insanity Syndrome (STIS). If that was a thing, it would be classified as a pandemic. It is common knowledge that during the years from ages 13 to 20, people go a little crazy. We chalk it up to the “the teenage years”. But I am not referring to the teenage years, I am referring to the release and popularity of Pokémon Go. Pokémon Go was one of the first augmented reality (AR) games for a mobile device. It overlays imaginary Pokémon on top of the real world, with the purpose of “catching them all”. Even though Pokémon Go is not technically an Esports platform, it is an MMORPG-based competition, the first step towards the Esports world colliding with the augmented reality world. Enter The Dragon No, I am not referencing the iconic Bruce Lee movie. I am referring to the Elder Dragon from the Esports game, League of Legends. After 2020, the Chinese computer company Rokid provided AR glasses to fans of a League of Legends championship at a stadium in Shanghai. Wearers of the AR glasses saw the Elder Dragon fly around the live tournament. This is one of the earlier examples of a live Esports tournament utilizing augmented reality. Even though the technology of augmented reality was invented in 1968 with the first heads up display, it was not popularly known until 2014 when Google released their wearable product, Google Glass. The idea of augmented reality is to inform you in an immersive way, whether it is a simple digital compass in a pilot’s helmet or a YouTube video you can watch hands free while you are performing an activity in the real world. You are immersing yourself into technology, or augmenting your own reality. Virtual Reality vs Augmented Reality Whereas augmented reality allows you to continue your normal daily tasks while information is fed to you, allowing you to work more efficiently or just be aware of your physical surroundings while interacting with technology, virtual reality allows you to enter a completely different world. You are connected to a computer with a 365-degree monitor with a possible tactile response using special gloves or controller. As a programmer myself, I am known to be “in the zone” when I am immersed in my work, but in virtual reality, I would be literally and virtually immersed in my work. There have been countless number of movies and TV shows that presented Virtual Reality immersion. One of the more recent TV shows, produced by Amazon, is Upload. This show combined a digital afterlife and virtual reality, with a mix of augmented reality. Just as augmented reality was originally invented in the 1960’s, so was virtual reality. Virtual reality would be eventually used to assist pilots in a flight simulator in the 1980’s. Whereas the main advantage of virtual reality is the ability to train and practice in virtualized environment, without the obvious issues of training in a real situation, the major downsides of virtual reality are the apparent detachment to reality and that, in some individuals, could cause motion sickness. Whether one interfaces with a computer through virtual reality or augmented reality, they are achieving a richer experience than just using a keyboard and mouse. This richer and enhanced experience is the whole purpose of something other than the usual and mundane. We live in an entertainment-based society. The more entertainment that a company provides its customers, the more happy customers the company will have and keep. COVID-19 Augmented and virtual reality have been growing in popularity in general through 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the growth of this technology. When people could not go to live events, they were attending events online. This includes both traditional sports and Esports. Event coordinators found themselves with a new challenge. How can they put people in seats when the seats do not exist in the physical realm. Would customers really want to pay the same high seat prices for merely access to a live streaming event on a two-dimensional screen? Enter augmented reality. An augmented reality viewing of sports and Esports events gives fans the enhanced experience they are willing to pay for: camera angles and views close to the action, real time statistics, and the ability to view instant replays all at the same time. Even though fans can participate in augmented and virtual reality on their cell phones, special goggles are the optimal way to experience events in this new reality. One such model is the Oculus by Meta (Facebook). Article content Advertisement for Meta Oculus 3 At the time of this writing, there are over 100 software titles for the Meta Quest platform, and growing. Meta announced that the Quest store has grossed over 1.5 billion dollars. This growing number of software titles in the Quest market and the gross revenue of the Quest store are a testament to how popular that the augmented and virtual reality experience has become. This popularity also makes the Quest interface the perfect environment for the growing Esports fanbase. The Vision Imagine watching a football (both American and Soccer) game from the field, while chatting with your friends across the country and comparing statistics of the players. This is the ultimate Esports experience. An old but well-known marketing slogan for EA Sports has always been, “It’s in the game”. With augmented reality and EA Sports’ global competition program, fans can really be “in the game”. If there is no global pandemic, when stadiums sell out, Esports event sponsors can sell virtually unlimited tickets for an augmented reality experience, as well as upselling a percentage of fans that are attending the event in person with a similar augmented reality experience. Because Esports teams have less chance of becoming injured, and individual players do not get paid as much as players in traditional sports teams, Esports events could be more profitable than traditional sports. More revenue and less cost make Esports competitions with augmented reality the capitalist’s dream. It will not displace traditional sports, but, in conjunction with augmented reality, will merge with traditional sports to even be a bigger part of our lives. -- originally published at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/virtual-world-esports-hye-gaming-vt3cc/?trackingId=XY61CJw6TquXDinPu8m1rQ%3D%3D