NBA To Record All-Star Game Using Virtual Reality Cameras
No ticket to attend the All-Star game over the weekend? Worry no more. Soon, you can finally have your own front-row seat in the NBA game in the comforts of your home. What’s more special is that you can watch the game as if you were really there. Recently, a virtual reality camera company called BigLook360 and the National Basketball Association (NBA) has teamed up to bring the NBA All-Star Weekend Game to the VR world. The said basketball event is held at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, USA and is being recorded using special cameras from BigLook360 that captures every detail of the game to be processed as a virtual reality footage.
Equipped with these specialized VR cameras, the NBA production staffers will be positioning themselves in strategic locations within the basketball arena in order to capture the VR footages. There will be cameras on certain locations such as the front-row seats and the scorers’ table to record various events over the weekend. These events include the All-Star Game itself, the slam dunk contest, the three-point competition, and the private practice session for selected players participating in the dunk challenge.
NBA fans who already bought their own Samsung Gear VR headsets are in for this limited treat. The processed VR footages of the NBA weekend events will be made available within the next few weeks. Once the VR special is out, it can be downloaded for free in the Samsung’s Milk VR app store. If you own one of these Gear VR headsets, you can watch the game as if you were having a front-row seat, without the front-row ticket price. (The VIP tickets for the game costs a cool $9,000.)
According to Jeff Marsilio, NBA Vice President of Global Media Distribution, they have no plans to release the unedited versions of the event footages; highlights of these VR videos will be made available into a processed 360-degree view “highlight reels”. He added that these virtual reality footages will have lots of replay value as the viewer can focus first on one event, and change his perspective on the next several times of viewing these VR footages.
Before working with BigLook360, the NBA has already been working with NextVR, the startup company specializing in broadcasting live events over VR. Marsilio said that some of the events recorded using NextVR’s technology are courtside footages of a preseason game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat, as well as a practice footage entitled “Keys to the Game” which was sponsored by Samsung.
For more information on the NBA All-Star weekend game as well as the VR technologies behind it, please visit the following websites:
http://www.nba.com/allstar/
http://biglook360.com
http://nextvr.com
