US Soccer has collaborated with Xtadium, the Meta Quest headset app developed by YBVR, to produce and display immersive highlights and behind-the-scenes content from recent matches played by its national teams. Footage from USMNT matches against Colombia and Brazil played in early June and the USWNT’s match against Mexico on July 13 are now available to view in the Xtadium app.
Ross Moses, US Soccer’s VP/business ventures, framed the initiative as an experiment with the medium that will give the federation a sense of the demand for -- and capabilities of -- the VR sports viewing experience.
“It’s a learning opportunity,” Moses told SBJ. “For the [VR] space at large, there’s just a big adoption issue. I don’t think most people realize how interesting this content is, the cool factor.”
The VR reels, Moses added, represent curations of action-packed moments and can range anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes. They were also captured from various angles, including just above the left side of the net as USMNT MF Yunus Musah narrowly missed a long-range strike off the post.
“That’s an incredible thing to watch in VR,” Moses said. “It feels like it’s happening right next to your right shoulder.”
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YBVR deployed VR cameras and videographers at each of the match venues -- FedEx Field just outside of D.C.; Camping World Stadium in Orlando; Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J. -- and handled post-production, with US Soccer providing oversight on which moments they wished to highlight.
In this phase, Moses said the focus was on “bite-sized clips, so that people can put the headset on and hit play and see very quickly what this can do.” US Soccer is exploring the potential of showing matches live, but Moses was quick to temper expectations.
“It’s possible we get into that -- there’s some rights issues with some of our partners. It’s on the table,” he said. “But I don’t know that we’re going to get to a point where that’s the mainstream way in which VR is used to consume matches.”
The federation’s takeaways from its first major VR project will be of the qualitative variety, Moses noted, whether it be gauging fans’ reactions to the tech, or even the opinions of performance professionals for potential training applications.
“We’re not expecting to break any records here. We understand it’s a limited scope,” Moses said. “When we get to a point, or when the space gets to a point, where there’s more users and it’s more well-understood what this can do, hopefully we’re better prepared to capitalize.”
