The National Football League (NFL), Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group and the Thinkwell Group have teamed up to present American football fans with a mixed reality (MR), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) football experience on Times Square in New York, with no head mounted displays required. This NFL Experience is designed to let visitors immerse themselves in America’s favorite sport.
“Cirque du Soleil approached us with a unique challenge,” said François Bergeron, Chief Operating Officer at Thinkwell. “How could we turn this space into an interactive NFL exhibit—better yet, into an engaging fan experience? We realized we could use the same technology and design principles that help us design and produce museums and theme parks to turn the NFL itself into an attraction—and eight engaging experiences backed by augmented reality and other cutting-edge, interactive technologies were born.”
The experiences for visitors to the NFL Experience include:
The Stadium (4D Theater): “The artistry of NFL Films combines with the thrill-ride of a rollercoaster in a 180-seat state-of-the-art theater featuring a 10-minute, thrilling show”. Four-dimension special effects bring fans onto the field with the weather elements and aromas (! Man. Ed.) from NFL games, and motion seats recreate the movement from plays. The Stadium is powered by twelve 4k laser phosphor projectors and produces an image with a resolution of 9,696 × 3,224 pixels on a wrap-around screen that is 154’ wide x 25’ tall x 30’ deep (46.9M wide x 7.6M high x 9.1M deep).
The stadium is an immersive theater with a variety of 4D special effects. (Credit: The NFL Experience
The 32’s: Explore team traditions, fun facts, top plays, and even get a look inside home stadiums around the country – all available on touch-screen displays throughout the exhibit. Fans will get to test their knowledge or vote for favorite players, and take a tour through all 32 teams with authentic club treasures on display.
Exploring NFL teams at the 32’s experience with touch screen and other displays. (Credit: NFL Experience)
Suit Up: Guests can pick their team, select a jersey number, and suit up as a real player with the help of digital face-tracking technology, turning them into a computer-generated image of their favorite star. This uses a depth camera and skeletal tracking combined with custom software to map a fan’s face and body to their own custom suit.
Suit Up allows visitors to see what they would look like wearing the uniform of their favorite NFL player. (Credit: NFL Experience)
Huddle Up: An immersive point of view experience that puts fans inside the team huddle to call the next play. Custom media monitors and voice recognition technology allow a guest to be the quarterback, pick the receiver and run the play, earning the praise of the coach.
Huddle Up involves personalized displays and sound combined with voice recognition. (Credit: NFL Experience)
Quarterback Challenge: Guests will become the quarterback of their team and watch as their favorite receiver runs the play. In three attempts, they will pass the football to the receiver on screen and compare performance stats – such as speed and completion percentage – against their team’s quarterback. The Quarterback Challenge uses pairs of industrial infrared scanner gates to measure the speed and position of the football which is fed into a custom software that displays the results on a Microsoft tablet, including whether the fan completed the pass or not.
The Quarterback Challenge involves passing a football to your team’s virtual Tight End receiver. (Credit: NFL Experience)
In addition to these five experiences, there are six additional experiences, if you include the snack bar which serves food representative of all 32 NFL stadiums.
The Thinkwell Group started in 2001 and specializes in the development of Location-Based Entertainment (LBE). The company creates custom, content-driven experiences for companies and brands in the physical world. Thinkwell provided a wide range of creative, design, and production services to bring the NFL Experience to life, including technical, lighting & audio design; in-field art direction; and installation and construction oversight. Besides the NFL Experience, other recent projects from Thinkwell include refurbishing of the President Nixon library and museum and modifying Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride to eliminate the Bride Auction scene. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Paris Disneyland has already been modified and the ride at other Disney theme parks will be modified in 2018.
Redhead, the central character in Disney’s Bride Auction, will not be eliminated. She will become a lady pirate supervising the auction of things looted from the townspeople. (Credit: Left: Bruce Chambers, Orange County Register/SCNG. Right: The Disneyland Resort)
The Thinkwell Group has also developed a technology they call Hyper-Augmented Reality or HAR. This technology includes see-through AR goggles that make it possible to mix a real, physical entertainment setting with virtual objects. One of the claimed properties of the HAR technology is no latency, allowing synchronization between virtual and real objects. HAR technology also includes haptic feedback. Thinkwell says, “Virtually indistinguishable to the naked eye, HAR creates a reality so real, you can touch it!” One of the goals of HAR technology is to produced experiences that cannot be replicated at home, even by users of the best VR HMDs. The company has posted a video on Vimeo describing the HAR technology. The HAR technology is not used at the NFL Experience and, so far, the company has not announced any HAR LBE installations but says they are still developing the system at their Los Angeles headquarters.
Test subject wearing HAR AR glasses and putting on the HAR haptic feedback gloves. In use, the subject also wears a backpack containing the drive electronics. (Credit: Thinkwell Group)
The NFL experience opened on December 1st and is not a pop-up exhibit but is intended to be a permanent Times Square attraction open from 9:00AM to Midnight. Like most AR/VR/MR entertainment attractions, it will have relatively steep ticket prices, starting at $39. According to the NFL Experience, it takes a visitor about 75 – 90 minutes to go throughproj the complete experience. –Matthew Brennesholtz
