Imagine walking through an NBA arena, and the most exciting game going on isn’t actually on the court.
You pull out your phone while heading to get a hot dog, open up an augmented reality app and search for virtual collectable coins during halftime. Find all 10 and you get to meet your favorite player.
Better yet, imagine being in the stands, pointing your phone at LeBron James, and watching a virtual halo appear over his head, filled with his stats, history and key facts.
This is the NBA in augmented reality. Hoops and holograms. Pokemon Give-and-Go.
And this is the future of sports. The near-future, even. Today.
“People want to be more immersed in the experience,” said Jerry Solomon, creator and executive producer of the upcoming Aurora Games, an all-female sports, music and cultural festival set to debut in September 2019. “You layer on all these different elements, and it is becoming more and more important that all these options become standard fare if you will. When you get down to the younger kids, they’re able to do things on multiple screens at the same time without even thinking about it. They want to be able to watch, play, learn, research, compete – all at the same time.”
When Solomon began crafting the idea of Aurora Games, he realized quickly that he did not want it to be like any other sporting event. Forget ice cream helmets and cotton candy: Solomon wanted this to be a rocking, rolling, festival-like, camp-out-and-bring-a-toothbrush-if-you’d-like free-for-all. Lollapalooza meets Olympics Village.
But even Solomon, a sports business veteran of more than 30 years, had no idea what XenoHolographic had in store for him.
Learn more about XenoPlay
A joint venture between Interknowlogy and Imagination Park Entertainment Inc. (Public Company OTCQB:IPNFF; CSE:IP), Xenoholographic is completely revolutionizing the game when it comes to augmented reality. Their XenoPlay augmented reality platform is a cloud-based, customizable platform that allows any organization – a team, an event, a league – to create and implement an augmented reality experience without having to build out the tech itself at a significantly reduced cost.
“Some of the things we’re talking about with Xeno weren’t on my mind,” Solomon said. “I didn’t know they existed. I’m learning every day about tech that I was not aware of. The concept right from the beginning was that this was going to be a festival-like experience, with a fan zone, with experiential events for the fans, a cultural exchange, a different perspective from the television broadcast, knowing there would be a whole social media that would be a part of it. Now with the augmented reality, the virtual reality, the games we’re going to be able to layer in, the merchandising applications – I would not have been going down that road. That’s where these guys really came into the picture. That’s why we were able to make the deal so quickly.
“As soon as I explained what we were all about, and they explained what they can do, it was a match.”
For Tim Huckaby, the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Xenoholographics, the possibilities are endless.
Huckaby and his team have been at the forefront of this augmented reality revolution. He’s built software for much of the Fortune 500 and he has been working towards this future for decades, including a stint at Microsoft as an engineer and, as he calls it, “frequent demo boy for the biggest bosses there. You guys have seen me, but you didn’t notice me.”
He and Gabriel Napora, the founder of Imagination Park Entertainment, started discussing AR in the movie industry and, Huckaby said, “we immediately clicked.”
“We had some intellectual property that was wildly valuable, but no place to put it,” Huckaby said. “The XenoHolographic formation paved the highway for that. We brought it to the joint venture, built the software, and we’re running like the wind.”
Where they are running, no one is quite sure. Their technology lends itself to endless directions – sports, entertainment, movies, education, manufacturing, real estate, health. Consider a doctor pulling out a phone to scan a beating heart, with information hovering above that may save a life. Or going to a movie theatre and experiencing interactions with the characters all around you.
“We’re trying to service a demand we see coming, where rather than having a million apps, we have a universe of AR, a platform we can deliver anything on,” said CTO and co-founder of XenoHolographics Rodney Guzman. “We really want to enable someone who works in marketing to not have to talk to any developer or speak about any technology, and to just be able to do it themselves.”
The team at XenoHolographic is particularly excited about the sports frontier, which has plenty of room to grow in terms of what teams and events offer. Some events, like the U.S. Open in tennis and the NFL Super Bowl Experience, offer some of the festival-like atmosphere that Solomon anticipates. But with such improved technology and now an outlet for it, fans can expect – and should demand – even more in the upcoming future.
“The U.S. Open is a perfect example of watching this evolution,” said Solomon, who has a lengthy tennis background and once represented Pete Sampras. “If you think back to the U.S. Open when it was at the West Side Tennis Club, a beautiful but very small place, you’d go, watch tennis, get something to eat, buy a souvenir and go home. Now when you go to the U.S. Open, you listen to commentary on a headset, get input in the arena from the replays, you’re able to get on a handheld device and find out what’s going on other courts. You have the ability to walk outside and experience everything you’ve been talking about.
“It’s been an evolutionary process: The consumer experience at an event has become more and more important.” XenoHolographic has made up its mind to be one of the leaders in this future AR world.
