The Future of Football is Holographic
By Tom Dunmore • Feb 17th, 2008 • Category: News & Notes • 9 responses
According to well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil, machines will be smarter than humans by 2029. Maybe that’s not even the right way of putting it — he actually thinks humans and machines will merge. “We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” he told BBC News.
I don’t know what a nanobot is, but it’s a frightening and fantastic prospect. Another bizarre piece of futurology this week also focused on how technology and human culture will fuse in the coming years: the Orange Future of Football report for 2008 was released. We wondered last week if the Premier League will be playing games in space sometime soon, so it seems we can’t even speculate wildly enough to keep up with the changes to the global game.
Therefore, we should pay attention to what we can look forward to as football fans, according to Orange:
Holographic Viewing
Traditionalists will not like this suggestion. “‘We could have scenarios in the future where no one goes to watch sport live, preferring instead to watch it on television,’ Roy Jones, professor of sports technology at Loughborough University, told the report. They think that “We will watch TV in 3D in pubs, giant screens outside stadiums and eventually in the home, all without the need for funny coloured glasses”, and empty seats in stadia will be filled by “computer-generated characters…to create the impression of full stadiums.”
Stadium living
Yet the report then says stadiums won’t be empty at all; in fact, they’ll be closer to the people than ever. Think that clubs moving out of their traditional homes in city centres into barren suburbs is bad for the game’s connection to the community? Think again, says Orange’s report.
Fans will be able to live in and around football grounds as the ultimate display of loyalty, an honour previously reserved for groundsmen. As clubs move to the suburbs to find the space for bigger grounds, they will look to rejuvenate areas by creating villages complete with retail and residential areas. Residents would never have to leave these mini-communities and would be totally immersed in the club.
A suburban reconstruction of the football club as hub of community-life. Sponsored by Starbucks, presumably.
The interactive stadium
And the stadiums themselves will be transformed experiences. We’ll have mini-monitors to, er, watch the game on TV instead of on the pitch in front of us and to order food without getting up. But, in fact, we will want to get up, as the Report thinks stadium designers will want to encourage standing and singing to avoid the sedentary atmosphere developing at grounds these days — and they’ll do this by decreasing leg room or fitting “vibrating seats which are not very comfortable.”
Alternatively, clubs could just stop making people sit down all the bloody time and build safe standing areas, but that’s not very futuristic, is it?
The mobile stadium
In a further pseudo-retro move, we’ll be able to recreate the freedom standing at matches allowed — letting us choose our viewing angle — by watching at home on a virtual avatar-based representation of the match .
‘Players could be extracted as different coloured markers from camera footage,’ says Graham Fisher. ‘In
the future it is not impossible that what you’ll be seeing will be an avatar-based representation of the game rather than a video version. From that point of view, you could choose where you were sitting, choose your viewing angles, choose to be in your favourite stand as it used to be when you were allowed to stand.’
If you squint really hard next time you’re at a game, then, you might just be able to get a glimpse of the future.
Fan ownership
Continuing this nostalgic theme, the Report then reminds us fans have lost the connection of their club to the community, citing FC United of Manchester, Barcelona and MyFC as examples of interest in supporter ownership that it sees as growing in response to this. “We will see fans increasingly demand to be more involved in the ownership of their clubs or threaten to withdraw their support,” it says.
On that note, it’s interesting that much of this report about the future of technology focuses on recreating the increasingly lost appeal football had in the first place, the experience of standing, singing and supporting your community club as opposed to today’s disconnected, global television audience (this tension is something very well captured by Brian at the Run of Play recently). But is the solution really 3-D representations and computer sprites filling in for actual fans?
Tom Dunmore is the editor of Pitch Invasion.
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It’s kind of a delicious science-fiction shudder that this gives me, in the end. All these proposals sound vaguely creepy by themselves (especially the live-in stadium village, which I guess is the logical extension of the fact that you can already take out a home loan on the Manchester United website), but who knows? Watching a hologram might just beat Chinese streaming software, after all—assuming we could still get Ray Hudson on our holograms, of course.
You’re absolutely right, Tom, about the bizarre way in which these high-tech innovations all seem designed to reconstitute a feeling that high-tech innovations are also responsible for endangering. I don’t think it can possibly work; the idea of a stadium filled with computer sprites seems so inherently nostalgic and deluded that it’s hard to imagine how it could sustain itself. I mean, it would only be necessary if other forms of viewing were so preferable to so many people that no one wanted to go to a match in person, and in that case why not simply do away with stadium atmosphere and see what the game is like then? I don’t like the idea at all, but again, who’s to say what we’ll want in 20 years?
The other thing that a lot of these predictions seem to expect is that our experience of the game will be taken out of reality in some ways and moved into our imaginations (controllable viewing angles, more immersive television broadcasts, avatar-based players, etc.) There’s an interesting tension between that and the nostalgia that you noted, and I think it’s why the nostalgia seems so unsettling, because it’s essentially promising a kind of solipsistic reconstruction of a feeling of togetherness without any of the inconvenience of actual human contact. I’m not sure where that ends: it could lead to the blurring between video games and sports that people keep worrying about, or it could lead to our being brought closer to the sensations and experiences of the players, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. David Foster Wallace has argued that one of the purposes of sports is to reconcile us to the fact of having a body, and from that angle, how interesting would it be to experience a match as if through the eyes of Adebayor or Iker Casillas?
Overall, though, a lot of the predictions in the report have a very Microsoft-ish feel of implausibility about them—I mean the sort of Bill Gates-style prediction where he takes a very limited view of what people want and then imagines a way to deliver it that’s massively overdone: your favorite song coming on every single time you get in your car, or a blank canvas that automatically assumes the appearance of your favorite painting whenever you look at it. That sort of thing never happens because in reality it would absolutely drive people crazy, and I feel like solving a sedentary matchday experience with uncomfortable vibrating seats is firmly in that category.
I love the idea of technology bringing me closer to the game, but do I really want to whoosh around a virtual stadium watching virtual representations of real players from whatever angle I choose? I don’t think so. But 15 years ago I doubt I would have liked the idea of a satellite map in my car, or a website where people would upload brief video clips of whatever they want, but now both those ideas seem pretty cool and not very threatening. You never can tell about the future. In any case, this is fascinating post about a fascinating report, Tom—thanks.
Aw crap.
Here I was all set to fire off a few one-liners, and that Phillips makes a series of serious points with his usual aplomb.
Anyway, it’s pretty-much all standard “futurist” bollocks of the type beloved by the purveyors of the technology that could, maybe, perhaps, one day (but not now) make it possible.
It would be helpful if the people who come up with this stuff just stayed in Second Life . . .
I was also tempted to merely ridicule, and couldn’t completely abstain. But whilst individually each prediction seemed absurd on its merits as ursus notes, it was interesting the way they formed something of a theme collectively regarding the attempt to reconstitute through technology exactly what “progress” had destroyed. And much thanks to Brian for elucidating this theme further in his comment.
Technological innovation isn’t negative in each step in itself — after all, I’m enjoying a much better (dare I say, more authentic) experience of a football match watching it in High Definition with Dolby Surround Sound than I did as a kid watching grainy highlights on my black & white TV in mono. Yet as a whole, the development of this greater virtual experience tempts people away and ultimately prices them out from the very thing that attracted them to the game in the first place as commercialisation runs rampant on the back of satellite transmissions. It’s something of a quandary for the global football fan.
I didn’t even mention the virtually “smelly” stadium mentioned in the report — perhaps they can recreate the beloved stench of piss and pot from the terraces of the 1980s we all miss in our plastic stadia today.
The whole holographic display thing is bollocks. Futurists throw this out every year because they think the Trekkies will get all excited that they’ll actually get something close to their holodeck one day. So now we’ll have tiny holographic boards in every pub, with 100 people sitting around them and watching 6-inch replicas of their footballing heroes mimicking their exact motions on the pitch. Will the Spurs supporters mock the little 6-inch Arsene Wenger stalking the sidelines, too? Hey, why not just set up entire grounds for life-size holographic displays and let fans root for ghosts in Liverpool jerseys rather than actual living, breathing players?
The only thing more bogus than holographic displays is holographic storage. Where’s that CD-sized 1-terabyte disk I was promised 5 years ago? All we have is 50GB Blu-ray discs? Bah.
I’ve often thought that those giant 12-screen movie theaters would one day go fully digital, accept satellite feeds and sell tickets to live events rather than films. Watching the game on a 25-foot screen at Quad-HD resolution has a certain appeal to it. However, it’s not nearly outlandish enough for the average futurist.
[...] read the full report in PDF form here and some intelligent commentary from Tom at Pitch Invasion here. Or you can read a quick summary with some poorly though out gut reactions [...]
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So now we’ll have tiny holographic boards in every pub, with 100 people sitting around them and watching 6-inch replicas of their footballing heroes mimicking their exact motions on the pitch.
It would be helpful if the people who come up with this stuff just stayed in Second Life . .
Continuing this nostalgic theme, the Report then reminds us fans have lost the connection of their club to the community, citing FC United of Manchester, Barcelona and MyFC as examples of interest in supporter ownership that it sees as growing in response to this