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Oculus Blog(September 15, 2021)

LEVEL UP YOUR GAME WITH VR SPORTS TRAINING

https://www.oculus.com/blog/level-up-your-game-with-vr-sports-training/

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Practice. Practice. And more practice. That's the key to becoming a great athlete in any sport. At times, that's easier said than done. Weather, team schedules, facility availability, and even physical injuries can make training difficult, if not impossible.

Unless, of course, you've got a VR headset.

VR sports training empowers players, athletes, and exercise aficionados to practice anytime, anywhere. While we're not trading in courts, fields, gyms, and ice rinks for good, VR provides a compelling sports training experience by enhancing live-action play and practice. Since your movements are tracked, VR sports training gives you the ability to analyze your movements and put them on repeat- until you've perfected your technique.

Across the sports spectrum, there are VR sports training games to help you improve your skills while having fun. Here's a look at some of the titles designed to level up your game in baseball, football, and martial arts.

REAKT Performance Trainer is the first virtual mental skills training system that will make you a better competitor. Based on technology originally developed for athletes, REAKT will make your brain perform faster with intense training and competition modes.

Step inside a virtual athletic training gym and push your mind and body to the limit. Boost your reaction time, decision making, and hand-eye coordination. Get real-time feedback to map your progress and hone your skills. Compete against other athletes and get your name on the leaderboard with the highest REAKT score. And earn badges and trophies with new weekly challenges designed to push your training even further!

Rezzil Player 22 is an ever-growing collection of athlete-designed training games and exercises that will improve your fitness and reaction times across a wide range of sports. Want the reaction times of an F1 driver? The fitness level of a pro athlete? Step into Rezzil Player 22 and train in drills developed with the world's best sports professionals.

Rezzil is the world's most advanced gym, in your living room. Improve your soccer heading technique without ball impact in over 60 training led levels that can be used in the real world. Push your fitness level with the basketball rhythm game, an intense workout that will also improve your vision on the court. Improve your reaction times in any sport with the Reaction Wall. Hit the lights as quickly as you can and see how you stack up on the world leaderboards. And when the training's done, head over to the Rezzil Spaceport and take on the bots in a fast-paced racket game full of mayhem and explosions.

VR Baseball Training

Rain delay? Not anymore. VR hits a home run when it comes to baseball training.

With VR Baseball, all you have to do is put on your Rift headset (or Oculus Quest with Oculus Link or Air Link), choose your bat, and step up to the plate to crush the pitch into left field. Choose the level of difficulty to increase your skills with each swing.

Need to boost more than just your batting average? Totally Baseball gives you a 360° VR baseball training experience. From pitching to swinging and catching, this is the only VR baseball training game that lets you practice all facets of the game. If the batter hits your pitch, you'll transform into an outfielder hustling to catch the ball. Just want to focus on one skill? Turn on the practice and tutorial modes to work on a specific area.

Football

Ready! Set! Hut! Get ready for a football experience unlike any other with Oculus.

Draw your own offensive plays and practice throwing like a quarterback when you step into one of the immersive stadiums in 2MD: VR Football Unleashed. By using a VR football game to train, players experience the onrush of opponents and practice rapid decision-making skills-all without the risk of tackle injuries.

VR Martial Arts

Controlling your breath, perfecting your posture, twisting your hips, and throwing a punch are all fundamental skills of martial arts. With Oculus, you can use VR to improve your martial art skills.

Train to become a Kung Fu Master (if only in your own mind) with Crazy Kung Fu (App Lab only). Hone your skills as you move through various levels. Throughout your journey, you'll fight a wooden dummy, using your body to punch, block, and dodge multiple spinning arms. These exercises are designed to help build muscle memory and train you to rely on quick thinking and instinct to overcome obstacles.

With a VR martial arts game, identifying areas of improvement is a snap. Since your moves are tracked with your VR headset, you'll get instant stats on your speed, accuracy, and strength.

Check out other VR sports training titles, including The Thrill of the Fight, Eleven Table Tennis, Sports Scramble, exVRience Golf Club, a host of kinetic sports experiences, and cardio fitness apps.

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Level Up Your Game With VR Sports Training

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VR sports training empowers players, athletes, and exercise aficionados to practice anytime, anywhere. While we're not trading in courts, fields, gyms, and ice rinks for good, VR provides a compelling sports training experience by enhancing live-action play and practice.

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Higgins, Jordan (January 17, 2020)Football Fields to Battlefields: Mixed Reality is Training’s Next

Frontierhttps://u.group/thinking/football-fields-to-battlefields-mixed-reality-is-trainings-next-frontier/

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Whether you're a superfan or a linebacker, mixed reality (MR) offers a way to completely immerse yourself in the game. Imagine being an NFL coach thinking about how to stay one step ahead of your opponents. The path to victory starts on the training field, so there's always a push to make training more realistic, safer, and more effective.

Why Mixed Reality? MR's Top Benefits Over In-Person Training

MR is emerging as a valuable tool for the NFL because it checks all three of those boxes. It allows players to run through plays with artificial intelligence (AI)-driven players that look, sound, and act like their real counterparts. This immersive experience has several unique benefits that, when used in conjunction with on-field training, are helping teams step up their game.

Football isn't the only industry that can benefit from virtual training, however. Imagine how helpful this capability could be for professionals in dangerous environments where success is critical-like the military and first responders. Below are three of the biggest benefits these professionals gain from adding off-field training to their regimen, and how you can make it work for your organization too.

Virtual training creates low-risk environments for high-risk fields

When training can mean the difference between victory and defeat, safety and injury or death, it is imperative that it be as realistic and effective as possible. With MR platforms, individuals and teams can share holographic experiences-visualizing complex mission and play scenarios to collaborate and train together before ever setting foot on the field. At U.Group we work with professional sports teams like the Baltimore Ravens to explore how MR training can combine with connected sensors to track spatial data that enables us to more accurately capture player performance and recreate plays from actual games. We're also working to leverage several applications that would help optimize military training at several stages of a soldier's journey. There are seemingly limitless opportunities in both the private and public sectors to gain competitive advantage, measurably improve material retention and performance, and accelerate time to mission and job readiness using MR.

Virtual training engages our brains better

Training and simulation methods have long sought to recreate the challenges these groups face as realistically and accurately as possible, but they're often very expensive to create, difficult to set up and move, and limited in their ability to measure data that can improve performance and outcomes. Our approach overcomes these challenges to create realistic training scenarios that actually work.

NFL players wear special sensors to generate a wealth of data that can be translated into player behaviors and characteristics. This information enables simulations that look and feel more like the actual players do. While this isn't an uncommon experience when playing traditional sports video games, it takes on another level entirely when experienced at true scale, with you at the center of the action.

For professional athletes, this means better preparation for game day. When our brains experience things at scale, it promotes better retention and memory formation by experiencing the simulation more like we experience the real world. When we incorporate audio-especially spatial audio that realistically replicates aural details in the environment-it enhances the feeling of being in the middle of the field. This engages our brains even more than visuals alone.

The benefits of multisensory learning have long been demonstrated and used to validate the cost, time, and expense of high-fidelity physical training simulators, but for immersive technology we're now seeing the ability to realize more of that potential in more affordable, easier to use, and highly portable platforms.

Virtual training has become available in several formats and price points

Walgreens pilots HoloLens2 to train employees on new store layouts before they're even built

The barriers that previously limited immersive training are rapidly being eliminated. Low-cost but highly capable devices like the Oculus Quest and Go make deploying training across an enterprise much more cost-effective than previous generations of virtual reality platforms. Devices like the HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap offer a completely standalone, wearable spatial computing platform for the cost of a mid- to high-end workstation laptop. Organizations of any size can now cost effectively train their employees using highly affordable and highly portable immersive training wherever and whenever they need it.

Content creation is still a challenge that requires skill and expertise across multiple domains. Even this is steadily improving, however. Content creation tools are becoming more user friendly, enabling training professionals and content creators to tailor training to their organization's needs. Platforms like Microsoft's Dynamic 365 Guides combine easy-to-configure platforms that enable workers to learn complex tasks in a physical space with detailed analytics about performance, allowing trainers to identify training gaps quicker while monitoring individual compliance and readiness.

Ways to incorporate immersive training in your organization

Are you looking to introduce a more exciting and immersive training experience to your team? There are several different types of immersive technology to choose from:

360 videos: the next step in training videos. Much like traditional video training production, but at real-life scale. These are best for a simple "choose your own adventure" interaction that can quiz and assess knowledge.

Immersive VR: training in a completely virtual digital environment. Most effective for training that benefits from more advanced interactions with digital representations of objects in the environment.

Mobile AR: uses the capabilities of mainstream mobile devices like smartphones and tablets to interact with digital 3D content in the environment.

MR: as discussed throughout this article, spatial computing devices like the HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap One offer the unique ability to blend physical and digital content together in the real world in true 3D. Especially good for training applications that benefit from people who need to keep their hands free for work and can benefit from voice-driven user interfaces.

If you're interested in introducing one or more of these options to your organization's training regimen, contact us today to get the conversation started. We regularly offer discovery workshops where you can get a hands-on demonstration of immersive training technology and learn about opportunities to measurably improve training for your team.

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Football Fields to Battlefields: Mixed Reality is Training's Next Frontier | U.Group - Digital Transformation

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Whether you're a superfan or a linebacker, mixed reality (MR) offers a way to completely immerse yourself in the game. Imagine being an NFL coach thinking about how to stay one step ahead of your opponents. The path to victory starts on the training field, so there's always a push to make training more realistic, safer, and more effective.

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How can i get better by studying football in AR?

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How can i get better by studying football in AR?

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Paul, Justin. (FEB 04, 2021) Football mad: enhancing the fan experience with 5G and Augmented Reality https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2021/2/football-mad-enhancing-the-fan-experience-with-5g-and-augmented-reality

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"Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that." (Bill Shankly, former Liverpool Football Club Manager)

On 16 December 2020, Vodafone, Sky and Ericsson collaborated with Germany's Bundesliga to trial the impact of 5G on the football experience at Dusseldorf Fortuna's Merkus Spiel-Arena in Germany. The trial used Dusseldorf Fortuna's 5G-enabled stadium to experiment with new ways of producing sports coverage as well as investigating how 5G could improve the fans' experience.The impact of COVID-19 on live sports

In 2020, live sport was devastated by the pandemic. Major sports fixtures from Wimbledon, the Grand Prix and even the 2020 Tokyo Games were cancelled, but arguably the biggest impact on professional sport was seen in European football arenas. By March 2020, Belarus was the only country in Europe that was still playing professional football, which did wonders for their TV viewing figures.

Currently, the status of football in Europe varies. Matches are played in front of extremely limited crowds or empty stadiums. - nothing like the capacity crowds that Europe's football leagues are used to. In the UK, there is much debate over whether English Premier League games should continue at all, with fixtures regularly being cancelled due to coronavirus outbreaks or key players being forced to self-isolate allowing junior players to take the field. There are huge concerns about the lack of socially distanced celebrations. Most of us accept that the football experience has changed forever (or at least for a long time).

The Fan Experience

My brother took my nephew to see "his team" Arsenal Play at the 60,000 seat Emirates Stadium.

My 9-year old nephew asked after hearing a loud cheer, "Did they just score?"

"No", said my brother, "trust me. You'll know when Arsenal score".

When they did the noise was incredible. Thirty-thousand people cheering. It is an incredible feeling and an incredible experience.

TV today can't give you that experience, but perhaps using 5G, it can offer a better, more immersive fan experience.

There are two major challenges that live football faces in the post-COVID world. The first is how to improve the experience of fans in limited capacity stadiums and at home. The second is how to improve the technical process of filming, editing, producing and broadcasting live TV in a more immersive but COVID-secure manner. Thankfully, 5G can solve both these problems.

Andreas Heyden, Executive Vice President Digital Innovations of the DFL Group:

"5G will permanently change the production and distribution as well as the interaction with the content of the Bundesliga. We look forward to the results of this test."

The Deutsche Fussball Liga (DFL) - the operating company behind Germany's Bundesliga - is well-known for being innovative. In 2020, the Bundesliga beat the National Basketball Association (NBA) and World Wresting Entertainment (WWE) to win the prestigious 'Best Sports Project Award 2020' at the DreamlandXR Music, Technology and E-Sports Festival in Las Vegas for their collaboration with Vodafone on the use of 5G in sports, and 5G is one of the five key technological innovations that DFL is investing in to digitize sports.

During the 2019/2020 season DFL developed a new immersive AR application for fans. The application provides images, statistics and match analysis as an AR overlay in real-time, and in the future, the application will show even more granular data about players and their performance.

One of the limitations of watching sport live is that the spectator doesn't have access to the match analysis and commentary that the TV viewer has. With augmented reality, application spectators have access to real-time analysis, video playback and goal-line technology - and can even hear what the referee is saying to players or the line judges. In fact, with 5G, the spectator in the connected stadium may get an even richer experience than the viewer at home.

5G-enabled stadiums

To enhance the 5G fan experience and improve media production, the Bundesliga stadiums have to be fully 5G-enabled to provide coverage AND capacity to every corner of the stadium. The average attendance (pre-COVID) at Bundesliga games is 43,000 spectators in an incredibly dense area with a huge percentage of spectators using LTE/5G-enabled smart phones throughout the game. By "5G-enabling" the Merkus Spiel-Arena in Dusseldorf, Vodafone has hugely improved the 5G capacity and coverage of the stadium to support new and innovative services.

The Bundesliga application is expected to generate 500Gb/s of data traffic within the stadium. Added to this, the stadium expects to use 5G connectivity for media broadcast and in-stadium retail such as electronic point-of-sale (ePoS) terminals in bars, restaurants and souvenir stalls. Stable, reliable and above all high bandwidth, 5G can have a major impact on stadium operations: doing away with miles of wires and cables and providing flexibility to reformat the stadium for other events such as concerts and conferences.

However, expecting high-volume consumer services with thousands of active smartphones to work alongside mission critical, high-quality services like media broadcast or electronic payments without interference is unrealistic without additional technology. Smartphones are designed to behave aggressively in networks to provide the best possible experience to their users, meaning that they do not "play well with others". This is where network slicing comes in.

5G network slicing

Ericsson has been working with Vodafone, Sky and the Bundesliga to provide a sliced 5G network. A network slice is a logically defined private network. It's a protected, prioritized allocation of bandwidth, resilience and latency carved out from the wider public network.

I like to think of a network slice as the equivalent of flying first-class on an airplane. It doesn't matter how crowded it gets in coach class, no one interferes with you stretch out on a fully reclining seat drinking free champagne.

While to some observers this may seem unfair, it's critical for delivering high-value, highly demanding real-time services such as video transmissions from a live football match. The ability to stream live coverage of football matches is the key to unlocking the huge TV revenues demanded by Europe's top flight football leagues such as the English Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga who stream the games in real-time to bars and homes across the globe. For the clubs streaming games, the stakes couldn't be higher and the penalties, if you'll excuse the pun, for transmission interruption mean that 5G couldn't be considered as a video transmission technology without this type of protection. 5G is the key enabler for the fan experience, but 5G slicing is the key enabler for live sports broadcasting.

5G enabled cameras

A key part of the 16 Dec 2020 trial at the Dusseldorf Fortuna vs. VFL Osnabruck match was the use of 5G enabled cameras.

To understand why 5G SIM enabled cameras are important you need to understand the challenges around filming live sports events. Many stadiums have permanent fixed cabling for broadcast, but even with permanent cable miles of cable has to be laid to connect cameras to the outside broadcast trucks which carry out on-site editing and production. The need for cabling limits the flexibility of the cameras and the shots the camera crew can get.

The outside broadcast trucks, effectively mobile TV production studios, have a staff of 5 to 6 and typically each major football match has two (N+1 redundancy). They are expensive to build, expensive to hire and in the post-COVID world difficult to make bio-secure. This creates challenges for the broadcasters, like Sky, who have a duty of care to their staff.

5G-enabled cameras allow more flexibility for TV cameras, and 5G-enabled smartphones can be used to augment traditional TV cameras. This is because the powerful cameras on many of the newest smartphones can be used to record and stream very high-quality 4K images. In 2015, the film "Tangerine" which was shot entirely on iPhones won accolades at the Sundance Film Festival for its high production quality. Modern smartphones are able to stream broadcast-quality video.

The other key benefit of 5G-enabled cameras is the ability to stream video off-site to alternative production locations in real-time, potentially bypassing the need for expensive outside broadcast trucks.

Opportunities for citizen journalists and fan TV

Another key opportunity with 5G-enabled smartphones is the ability to improve the fan experience by enabling citizen journalists and celebrity influencers. For example, some fans may prefer to watch the match filmed by a citizen journalist from the stands to get a more "genuine" experience.

5G enables smartphones and star-players, celebrities and influencers to stream, comment, answer questions in real-time. How would you like to hear a commentary on the match from the team captain seconds after reaching the dressing room, perhaps shot by a teammate? How would you like to watch the game from the viewpoint of the team mascot? Anything is possible and offers the opportunity to provide "long-tail" content that personalizes the experience and increases engagement.

Virtual transmission centers - COVID-secure media production

I'll talk about the virtual transmission center in detail in another blog in this series, but it's interesting to understand the impact of 5G-enabled stadia and 5G-enabled cameras on media production. The ability to stream live footage to either a major TV production center, which would be much easier to make COVID-secure, or allow TV production to be carried out by home-based workers is a game changer for the industry. It has the potential to make huge operational cost savings, but also enables TV production staff to carry out the media production task in real-time from their homes. This is the concept of the "virtual transmission center".

Why 5G-enabled stadia and sliced networks are essential

The game on the 16 Dec 2020 undoubtedly proved the potential of 5G to change the way live sports is filmed and produced and highlights how sports coverage will evolve over the next few years.

Vodafone, Sky and the Bundesliga have successfully tested these new concepts with the help of Ericsson as a technology partner. However, none of these innovations could take place without two key capabilities in place:

1. 5G-enabled stadia

2. 5G network slicing

To use 5G for real-time video production the stadium must be fully 5G-enabled. This means that coverage and capacity at the site must be planned in detail. Every location in the stadium must have 5G coverage including the pitch, the stands, the access tunnels and dressing rooms. However, simple coverage isn't enough the stadium must also have sufficient capacity to support the needs of broadcast, commercial services and of course thousands of individual spectators. The Bundesliga believe that their application will generate around 500Gb/s of data which is the equivalent of downloading 100 DVD-quality movies per second which is a phenomenal data rate.

Compared to that the commercial media production service only needs a few 10s of Gb/s but with a much higher resilience and ultra-low latency to protect the broadcast coverage, but that is still the same as 10-20 households' peak usage. It's important to recognize that without additional protections in the 5G network it would not be possible to provide this type of reliable cable-free TV production service. Simply 5G-enabling the stadium isn't enough, you must have network slicing.

Charly Classen, Executive Vice President Sports at Sky Deutschland:

"Based on the first live test with 5G at a Bundesliga soccer match, we want to demonstrate together with our partner Vodafone the potential that lies in the use of the new mobile communications technology in our sports productions. In the future, wireless cameras will offer us completely new opportunities to get even closer to the fans in the stadium."

5G network slicing

The TV production service needs a sliced network to be viable. The 5G broadcast slice is a logical sub-network which shares the same physical infrastructure of the stadium but is protected from interference from 1000's of smartphones simultaneously using the network. Network slicing is the enabler for this commercial service, and this is Ericsson's role in the project.

The Ericsson Orchestrator creates and maintains an end-to-end network slice across the core network, the transport network and the radio-access network (RAN) which provides a service with guaranteed bandwidth, resilience and latency regardless of anything else happening in the wider network. This network slice enables a high-value enterprise service for the broadcaster.

In a recent report by Dell'Oro, 69 percent of service provider CEO's believe the largest incremental revenue opportunity for enterprise is 5G, and when you see the impact of 5G slicing on live sports broadcast you can understand why.

Football, as they say, is a "game of two halves". What we've seen in the first half is a dazzling display of new technology with the promise to change the way we view and experience sport forever. In the second half we expect to see more sports leagues, communications service providers and broadcasters leveraging this technology to make what we saw at the Dusseldorf Fortuna vs. VfL Osnabruck a much more mainstream approach. 5G has the ability to make the "beautiful Game" even more beautiful in the future, or if not beautiful certainly more engaging for the football fan.

Read our network slicing white paper:

Want to know more?

Find out more about the Sky, Vodafone and Bundesliga trial.

Find out more about the Bundesliga's 5G-enabled application.

Read more about Ericsson's network slicing solution.

Read more about Ericsson's connected stadium solution

Read more about Core network

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Football mad: enhancing the fan experience with 5G and Augmented Reality

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"Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that." (Bill Shankly, former Liverpool Football Club Manager) On 16 December 2020, Vodafone, Sky and Ericsson collaborated with Germany's Bundesliga to trial the impact of 5G on the football experience at Dusseldorf Fortuna's Merkus Spiel-Arena in Germany.

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How does VR help make you a better Football player?

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How does VR help make you a better Football player?

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DesigningDigitally. (01/30/2020)HOW THE NFL USES VIRTUAL REALITY FOR TRAINING https://www.designingdigitally.com/blog/how-nfl-uses-virtual-reality-training

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How the NFL Uses Virtual Reality for Training | DDINC

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Games, and more recently, game-based learning, are dominating the development of Virtual Reality. Devices such as the Oculus-Rift, Hololens, Google Glass, and Leap Motion , to name a few, are blasting VR into outer space when it comes to usability and applicability.