People seem to be in perpetual fear that technology will take away all the jobs. The bit they always miss is that for every job tech takes away, it invents two. The classic examples of technology inventing new work and new industries are in sport and entertainment. Given it is Football Grand Final week here in Australia – let’s explore where football viewing is heading next.
In the future, watching football, or any sport, will be a much better experience than it is today. Firstly, we’ll have an augmented reality layer on the screen. Not only will you be able to turn on live stats of your favourite players or teams, you’ll also be able to turn them off too. Camera angles won’t dictated by the broadcaster – they’ll be chosen by the viewer via the broadcaster. There will be cameras literally everywhere. There will be super-speed high-definition recording on the goal posts, on the ground and even from the ball so you can watch it sail through the goalposts. You get to choose which replays to watch and when – it will be total director control from the comfort of your sofa. But if you want to get more involved in the game, here is where it gets really cool.
Utilising the latest technology in ‘smart reality contact lenses’, you’ll be able to get the players’ view of the game live while the game is in progress. Log in before the game and you can immerse yourself in exactly how Dusty Martin, Christiano Rinaldo or Russell Wilson experience it – watching the match from their eyes. Of course, you’ll pay for the privilege. It’ll also make sense for players to market themselves to be exciting enough for viewers to log onto, as they’ll be paid per fan log in. But if that’s not close quite enough – then don’t forget to don your football haptic suit. It’s a suit you can wear while watching the game which allows the wearer to to feel in real time the bumps and tussles the players feel on the field. The suit will raise your temperature to match the players’, give you the same palpitations as their heart beats and hear their on-field verbal communications. How is this be possible? These haptic suits can link to players’ uniforms which will be threaded with tiny electronic components to send real-time data across the web using IoT technology. The experience of sport and entertainment in the future will be so real it can almost get dangerous.
But if you think about it – this is the trajectory we’ve been on for a long time. We go from hearing about a football match on radio, to watching a replayed match on a black and white screen, to live HD with slow motion and stats to actually becoming the players. Technology always brings us closer to something far away and allows us to experiences things we otherwise wouldn’t. The opportunities for innovations like this is sport and all forms of entertainment are really limitless.
These possibilities will create jobs, revenue and companies which are yet to exist. The unbelievable part is the technologies already exist to make it happen. My only question is – what are you waiting for?