Magic Leap teaming up with NBA
Partnership to deliver enhanced digital basketball ‘experience’
If you’re a Miami Heat fan, get ready for a wildly enhanced experience through the magic of a Plantation-based technology company.
Magic Leap — which has developed a digital “mixed reality” platform and recently announced its first product, Magic Leap One, Creator Edition — said it has partnered with the National Basketball Association on a new “living room” experience to watch basketball.
The company said its first sports partnership is with the NBA and Turner Sports, “ushering in the next generation of sports viewing and interactivity through the power of Magic Leap One and a newly created NBA App that will be available through the platform.” The NBA experience will be a feature of Magic Leap One Creator Edition, a headset being launched later this year.
The NBA app is expected to be launched later this year. Turner owns the games they license from the NBA and makes those games available through the TNT cable channel, but the NBA app will provide an enhanced social experience, according to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. He announced the partnership with Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz this week at the Recode Media conference in Huntington Beach, Calif.
Magic Leap also posted about the partnership on its website blog.
“Last year, a billion people — one out of seven on the planet watched some portion of an NBA game,” Silver said at the conference, adding that the games are distributed for viewing in more than 200 countries. “But they’re not quite sharing in that experience, those so-called lifelong memories of experiencing [the game] with friends and family members.”
Abovitz described the possibilities of the new technology, including “meeting” a player like former Heat star LeBron James, or watching a game from a different perspective. “There are all these superfan experiences we’re thinking about,” he said.
The NBA app and Magic Leap’s product will “take everything you
love about normal television and amplify that,” Abovitz said at the conference.
Magic Leap prepared a video for the conference with Basketball Hall of Famer and NBA analyst Shaquille O’Neal describing Magic Leap One. No price has been announced yet, but Abovitz said at the conference it will be priced like a “premium computer.”
The company describes its technology as generating digital light blended with natural light “to produce lifelike digital objects that co-exist in the real world. This advanced technology allows our brain to naturally process digital objects the same way we do real-world objects.”
Magic Leap has raised $1.9 billion in financing from investors including Alibaba and Google.
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