MLB has built its own virtual ballpark, the league announced Wednesday, with an eye towards rapidly approaching sports media disruptions to come.
The digital venue will debut during Saturday’s MLB All-Star Celebrity Softball Game. Accessible on the web, the site will give users the chance to explore the park as an avatar, speak with fans around them and watch a live stream of the game on in-park video boards as well as exclusive interviews with the celebrities.
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“If something exciting happens on the field, you would hear the crowd noise the way you would at the stadium,” MLB EVP of media and business development Kenny Gersh said in an interview. “It’s not like the manufactured crowd noise of a video game. It’s actually the other people that are in the environment with you reacting the way they would react. So that’s what I’ve been really impressed with.”
The virtual venue will also include trivia, mini-games and a scavenger hunt, and visitors—the online place can host 15,000 concurrent users—will receive a commemorative digital ticket for attending.
“It’d be so cool if I, today, had a ticket from that first [MLB.com] stream in 2002 and I was like, ‘Hey, I was there, I watched that Yankees-Rangers game, here’s my digital ticket,’ Gersh said. “Like 10 years from now, my goal is that this will be that seminal event that people will be like, ‘I was there, here’s my ticket stub, I was one of the first.'”
MLB developed the project with help from London-based Improbable, a virtual world developer best known for helping NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club expand its metaverse ambitions. Baseball plans to hold additional events in the virtual ballpark this season, with the ability to update the space—say, adding a Green Monster, or ivy to the outfield walls.
“We’re at a point in time in technology where you can see the future coming a little bit,” Gersh said. “That idea of being able to bring people together to an experience and event in this type of virtual setting where you feel like you’re connected and you feel like we’re together I think is really important as we look to evolve the way that we deliver the game of baseball to our fans.”
While a shrinking cable subscriber base and Diamond Sports Group’s ongoing bankruptcy has stirred doubt about the longevity of the current business model underpinning sports media, a number of projects point towards new ways of watching games.
On the software side, teams like the Atlanta Braves are building their own virtual venues to host viewers. Meanwhile MLB has unveiled a 3D version of its Gameday play-by-play offering, which one day could lead to fans experiencing the action from the perspective of a first-base coach or shortstop. In terms of hardware, Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro headset has reinvigorated interest in virtual reality kits. A big part of its pitch to journalists included a demo that brought headset wearers to the dugout of an MLB game.
“As all these different kinds of technologies come together, it can create a really immersive experience for our fans to really see the live action in a way that hasn’t been possible for people before,” Gersh said.
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