The metaverse, while still in its very early days, has proven its potential in recent years to provide new levels of engagement and connection with fans. Music artists have taken advantage of virtual spaces to host performances and other fan experiences, and the sports industry is now beginning to take a big step into the metaverse as well — namely, in the form of virtual venues.
Last month, the Atlanta Braves unveiled their plans to be the first MLB team to enter the metaverse with a digital version of Truist Park, while England’s Manchester City also announced its plans to create a virtual version of Etihad Stadium. Digital Truist Park will be officially debuted in April, and in order to build out this new online experience for their fans, the Braves collaborated with metaverse company Surreal Events.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Surreal had built out an Unreal Engine based platform to power virtual events and experiences, and the company has a close relationship with Unreal Engine developer Epic Games. When the Braves began exploring digital engagement opportunities with Epic, a partnership with Atlanta-based Surreal Events naturally followed.
The idea for Digital Truist Park came out of the challenges of the pandemic, but beyond a Covid strategy, the Braves “were looking at this as a digital first strategy to continue to move in a direction that Covid had just accelerated,” shares Surreal co-founder and CEO Josh Rush. “It took a little bit of time to figure out how the project would take shape and the scope of everything, and we eventually got the greenlight in June 2021 to start digital twinning Truist Park.”
Surreal worked with the Braves’ in-house marketing teams and architectural design partners during the twinning process, the initial phase of which took about eight to 10 weeks. However, the launch of the virtual experience was ultimately pushed out several months as the Braves became occupied with the MLB playoffs and World Series.
“This is the first of many runways that the Braves and other sports teams like them are going to want to do in this space,” notes Rush. “That is to say, a lot of learning, testing, getting fan feedback, making sure that the fans enjoy and want what we’re doing. The Braves are taking a long-term approach to really exploring what this looks like for them as an organization, and how it could change the way fans experience baseball online.”
Initially, Digital Truist Park will enable fans to create avatars to explore the virtual space, connect with other fans, play games, and participate in other interactive features. However, this will be an ongoing experience that will evolve and be enhanced over time.
“The Braves have a fan fest every year, which is where you get to come out and see the field, tour the stadium, and meet with the players. Digital Truist Park becomes a place where they can do extended fan experiences, player meet and greets, etc.,” explains Rush. “Then, we layer in the gaming aspects of Easter eggs and contests and minigames. When we roll this out, you'll be able to do things like race [Braves mascot] Blooper on a parkour-style course and have an opportunity to win prizes.”
Surreal is also designed to integrate NFTs should the team decide to implement them down the line, which is another feature that lends itself particularly well to sports experiences, according to Rush, thanks to the amount of data that games generate in real time.
“The ability to visualize that data in three dimensions like you can on Surreal, with your friends, is what makes it so promising. That's where all this potential, we think, lies for sports — whether it's real-time tracking of balls or movement, or the actual stats that are generated from the game, like the speed of a pitch. Your NFT trading cards, if you will, then become valuable, not just from an art perspective, but from the utility that comes with having a unique card that you can use in some form of gamification.”
Eventually, fans can also look forward to the possibility of watching games in real-time in the metaverse, similar to the Brooklyn Nets’ netaverse experience, through volumetric capture, although the technology is still complicated and very expensive to execute.
“We really look forward to the day when the volumetric streaming technology advances enough to where we could see it adopted at scale on a platform like Surreal, and we're working with all the cloud partners and tech companies that are building that specific tech right now,” says Rush.
For now, Rush holds nothing but a positive outlook on the future, and ongoing enhancements and innovations will only continue to improve experiences for both fans and teams.
“Our belief — and not just because we're optimistically rooting for it — is that every major sports team will have a digital twin, and that the experiences will continue to enrich, to where that same digital twin is networked to an augmented reality application on your phone that would allow you to communicate with other users inside of a simulation like Surreal.
“So if you were at the stadium in real life, you'd be able to see your friends who were connected online in avatar form. That idea that you can connect with your friends in real time, that you can game across a league of activity, is really where we see the opportunity going forward. It will be a place where people will want to spend more time.”