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Dreamlaser contributed to organizing phygital basketball at the Games of the Future. The event took place from February 27 to March 3, 2024 at Kazan Expo, bringing together over 2,000 athletes from 107 countries.
Phygital sports is a new form of competition that combines elements of classic sports and cybersports. Phygital is a term coined by merging two words — 'physical' and 'digital.' This technology exists at the nexus of physical and digital interaction with an environment. Participants train in the real world, with their movements and performance tracked by motion sensors, AR and VR headsets, allowing them to play using an online simulator and compete with other athletes in real time.
The event was held with the support of the Russian Federation of Phygital Sports.
Phygital basketball: Technical implementation by dreamlaser
Phygital basketball combines a basketball simulator and a 2x2 basketball game. The digital part of the match had the teams playing the console until one of them scored 19 points. The second part pitched them against each other on a LED court created by our team.
Our job was to create a system capable of transmitting real-time data about players' movements and their physical condition to the basketball court. For this purpose, we put forward our LED court technology in collaboration with b-sight, a renowned designer and manufacturer of high-tech tracking sensors for athletes, who handled the tracking and data collection.
The player tracking system developed by b-sight is based on special sensors on players' vests. The sensors, accelerometer and gyroscope collect temperature, pressure and heartbeat data. Real-time communication presented a challenge, as the conventional b-sight system normally provides data after the physical activity. To address that, antennas were used: four of them were placed at the corners of the court, with two more along its sidelines, collecting readings from sensors similar to the way a cellular network operates. All of this had to be tested in advance.
The data received was transferred to TouchDesigner, a special software that combined the data about the athletes with visual content and sent it back to the server to be then displayed on the LED court.
The game was played on the state-of-the-art LED court by Absen, China, with a coverage area of 323 m², a maximum load of 2.5 tons per m² and a data refresh rate of 3840 Hz. The projections on the court were controlled by Novastar H9 controller, famed for fast transmission of 4K signals. The Disguise server was the "'brain'" of the installation, collecting all the necessary signals and content and transmitting them to the LED surface.