Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Basketball fans will soon have the opportunity to see the NBA All-Star Game festivities in a whole new way, as the league and Samsung will be teaming up to film virtual reality content at this several of this weekend’s events, including the slam dunk contest.
According to The Verge, the content will be filmed for Samsung’s Milk VR platform using two cameras provided by a company called BigLook360. While the highlight will undoubtedly be the dunk contest, the All-Star game itself and the three point contest will also be filmed.
Unfortunately, NBA Vice President of Global Media Distribution Jeff Marsilio tells Wired that the VR broadcast won’t be streamed live. However, the footage will be released in the Milk VR store within the next few weeks and will be available free of charge.
Virtual reality gets sporty
Marsilio added that the camera crews will be experimenting with different rig locations for each event. For the game itself, the cameras will be in the front row, while they will be placed at the scorer’s table for the dunk competition and the baseline for the three-point contest.
“We’re shooting the slam-dunk practice, which I think is going to be really interesting,” he said. “It’s basically an empty gym for the players to practice their signature dunks. VR is amazing for big spectator events, but it’s also great for those kind of intimate access moments. You see somebody in a location where you couldn’t even buy a ticket for. You feel like you’re there.”
The NBA will not be releasing full, unedited video of each event, however. Rather, the plan is to take the most exciting moments and feature them in 360-degree highlight reels. At this point, it is unclear exactly what form those videos will take. Marsilio said that the league will experiment with the highlight packages, but thought it might be somewhat “more contextualized.”
He added that he believes that the video packages will have a tremendous amount of replay value, as users may watch the first time to focus on a player in the dunk contest, then a second time to view the footage at a different angle and to see reactions to the dunk. Unfortunately, at this point there are no plans to record a player dunking the ball over a VR camera rig.
“Maybe next year,” Marsilio told Wired, laughing as he spoke, according to the website. “Given that we’re still exploring what works in VR, we’re not really ready to bring it to a player and say hey, mess with this in your dunk preparations.”
To watch the footage, you will need to have a Samsung Oculus-powered Gear VR headset and the Galaxy Note 4 tablet needed to power it, according to USA Today. The cost of the Gear VR Innovator Edition headset is $199.99, and the Galaxy Note 4 is $299.99 with a two-year contract, the newspaper added. The footage may be free, but the tech required to view it is another story.
“The announcement comes at a time where bleeding-edge camera technology is starting to shake up the look of sports broadcasts,” The Verge said. “Just last month, the NHL used GoPros during the live broadcast of its own All-Star Game. ESPN did the same when it strapped broadcast-capable GoPros on a handful of athletes at the winter X-Games.”
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