Virtual reality may change game
When he put on the mask and slipped on the headphones, Brandon Allen wasn’t sure what he was getting into. Then it began — and he was “engulfed.”
Arkansas’ senior quarterback is among a growing number who sees — and feels — the potential of virtual reality in college football. Created by STriVR Labs, a start-up company grown out of a former Stanford kicker’s master’s thesis, the technology is in its infancy. But the universal first impression of the virtual reality trainer is something like this:
“It’s insane,” Arkansas coach Bret Bielema says. “This changes the game.”
When Allen slipped on the gear — an Oculus Rift headset, followed by a nice set of headphones, he was suddenly standing not in the conference room adjacent to Bielema’s office but in the quarterback’s position on the practice field. Looking straight ahead and then scanning left and
“It’s insane. This changes the game.” Bret Bielema, Arkansas football coach
right, he recognized the defensive alignment and saw how the offense was arrayed. Then Allen turned around. Behind him, a running back awaited the snap.
“You think you can touch the guy,” Bielema says. “Like he’s right there.”
A voice barked out the cadence. The ball snapped. As Allen watched, a play unfolded.
“You could look anywhere you wanted,” Allen says. “You could watch the whole play or behind you. It was so realistic that way. You could go through your keys and your reads. … You felt like you were actually in the practice.”
Engulfed. Or, as STriVR founder and CEO Derek Belch would say: immersed. And to the growing numbers who have experienced it, the possibilities are seemingly endless.
Seen initially as a way to train quarterbacks — mental exercises, in essence, to reinforce actual practice repetitions — the technology has morphed into use with other positions. Enterprising coaches have brainstormed ways to employ virtual reality in recruiting, too.
The current STriVR client list includes Stanford, Arkansas, Auburn, Clemson, Dartmouth and Vanderbilt as well as the Dallas Cowboys. That’s nearing the limits of what Belch’s group can handle — at least for now. But it’s only the beginning.
“There’s no stopping this,” Stanford coach David Shaw says. “We know that. … It won’t be too long until it’s all over the place.”
Shaw’s team was the earliest user of the technology — used, Shaw says, as guinea pigs, as Belch and Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson explored ways to shoot video during practices last season. Shaw prompted Belch last December to leave his position as a graduate assistant with the Cardinal football program to pursue the new business. The coach also provided some of the seed money for the start-up (which, in a Bay Area tech company cliché, is based out of a residential garage).
“This is really cool,” Shaw says. “This is something that could inspire people. This is going to change my profession. This is something that is going to change, potentially, athletics to some degree. At the very least, four or five different sports are going to be different four or five years from now because of this.”
STARTED IN THE CLASSROOM Belch, who kicked the winning extra point in Stanford’s upset of Southern California in 2007 — a victory that started the Cardinal on their current path of success — first considered virtual reality in football when he took a class taught by Bailenson in 2006. Comm 166: Virtual People explores “the concept of virtual people or digital human representations; methods of constructing and using virtual people; methodological approaches to interactions with and among virtual people; and current applications.”
Afterward, Belch suggested the professor build a virtual reality trainer for football.
“Back then, the technology wasn’t good enough,” Bailenson says. “I said, ‘ Come back when it gets better.’ And he did.”
Bailenson’s research into how people learn in virtual environments spans almost 20 years. He has consulted with the military; his lab has had visits from presidents of companies and countries. Weeks after spending three hours in Bailenson’s lab, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spent $2.3 billion to buy Oculus.
There have been several important technological advancements in the field in recent years, but among the biggest breakthroughs is the development of high-quality and relatively inexpensive headsets. Even a year ago, Bailenson says, he “would have been terrified” to deliver a system to a client because the helmet would have cost $40,000. But Oculus Rift’s Development Kit 2 retails for $350.
When Belch began his graduate work, he and Bailenson agreed his thesis should focus on the potential for virtual reality in football.
“Goal No. 1 was to do a good enough job to get an A on the project,” Belch says. “No. 2, help Stanford football. Floating in the back of our minds was No. 3: find a way to do this commercially.”
Last season, with Shaw’s blessing, Belch shot video each Monday night, concentrating on opponents’ defenses from the quarterback’s perspective.
Bailenson says he recognized they might have something special when Shaw first put on the headset. The coach’s immediate reaction was twofold: We need this, and how can I keep you from giving this to my competitors? But Bailenson didn’t realize its potential value until he watched an NFL team practice.
“I didn’t know how precious and rare a moment on the field surrounded by the starters was,” Bailenson says, “even how rare it is to get the starters reps. If we can create an immersive virtual reality experience that makes the quarterbacks and other players feel they’re on the practice field, we’ve hit a home run.”
Bielema says virtual reality might be most useful, at least for now, in teaching Arkansas’ schemes to incoming freshmen from the inside out and for preparing backups who don’t get as much work in practice as starters.
“Anytime you can get a rep — it’s as close to a practice rep as possible — all it can do is help,” Auburn coach Gus Malzahn says. “It’s really good.”
GROWING INDUSTRY
STriVR isn’t the only start-up in the early stages of a virtual reality system. EON Sports counts Kansas, Mississippi, Syracuse and UCLA as Football Bowl Subdivision-level clients. Unlike STriVR, EON uses video game graphics; according to founder Brendan Reilly, that allows the system to be interactive.
“There’s no way to interact with the video yet,” he says. “Maybe in two years. But you have to be able to interact with it, because you have to have the ability to fail and do it and process.”
With EON’s system, a playbook can be input with little effort.
“Every coach we showed it to asked, ‘ What if I want to move that linebacker?’ ” Reilly says. “So we designed an X’s and O’s playbook that allows you to create simulations that coaches are comfortable with. It breathes life into the X’s and O’s.”
Reilly says EON Sports has sold packages to nearly 100 high school programs — $799 for an annual license — and is on the verge of adding a $39.99 smartphone version that includes interactive training programs and a series of prepackaged plays.
“Where this has the most dramatic impact,” Reilly says, “is on the 14-year-old in Kansas who doesn’t get elite level training. … We’re democratizing it. Any kid who wants to get better can use it to get better.”
But STriVR’s pitch — and what Belch and Bailenson say is the most important difference between Belch’s product and others — focuses on the reality part of virtual reality.
“Real bodies,” Bielema says. “It’s not animated electronics. It’s not like playing Madden. It’s live bodies with live mechanical body movements. It’s voices. You hear coaches talking. You hear the things you hear on the practice field.”
‘YOU SEE EVERYTHING’ Everywhere STriVR was implemented last spring, someone seemed to come up with a new idea. Auburn quarterback Jeremy Johnson recalls the first play he saw, from a seven-on-seven drill shot during spring practice.
“Once he cut the play on, I actually went through all my progressions,” Johnson says. “You really just scan the defense for all the coverages. Whatever coverage they roll to. You can see everybody. It’s like watching film, but you’re there. You see everything.”
But coaches experimented with shooting video from the perspective of safeties, middle linebackers and even centers.
“This has quickly moved from a quarterback tool to something we can use for every position on the field,” Belch says.
Bielema also had Belch shoot video inside each of the Hogs meeting rooms during position meetings. “If we’ve got an offensive lineman (recruit) visiting in the middle of June, he can go into a meeting room (virtually) and feel like he’s sitting in that room,” Bielema says. “Just some crazy recruiting tools.”
If the possibilities with virtual reality seem endless, they just might be.
“This has quickly moved from a quarterback tool to something we can use for every position on the field.”
STriVR CEO Derek Belch