Idea for best use of rift - e-sports spectator

[android78]

This is a bit of a pie-in-the-sky dream for me, but I believe it will happen some day.

My thought is that people love watching all kinds of sports on TV. My Idea comes from the following thoughts:
1. It seems to be something that the majority of people enjoy, watching other who are the best of the best competing.
2. I love video games, but I am nowhere near being a pro gamer. Given this, I would LOVE to be able to watch pro-gamers really battle it out in a user-friendly way.
3. Pro-game broadcasts seem to just have the view as seen by a player of the game. There isn't any independent camera for the viewer like you have in real sports.

What I would love is to have a game, similarly to how they currently are (each console sends player position, weapon shooting, etc to a server... the server combines all of that and sends response to each console so that the positions, hit detection, etc can be reflected for the players) but it would add a delay and broadcast the combined positions of all players and interactions to 'viewers'. As a Viewer, you would have the game loaded, but you would have a virtual camera within the game that you could position wherever you wanted. You would get to know the good places in a game to 'sit' to get the best view of the action, but you could get as close as you want without interfering with the play. The idea of having a delay is to avoid the use of this to cheat within game.

I watched the PS4 presentation the other day and, while it's pretty cool having the share button, I really don't see this being as good as it could be. It will use massive amounts of data, and it's still from a fixed position. When you have the data all being transmitted as geometric locations, why would you then limit it so much?

What do you guys think? I really think this would create a whole new ball game (so to speak) for the idea of sports viewing, and I just don't understand why this hasn't happened already. For elite games, you could have sponsorship with in-game advertising, etc... HUGE business opportunity IMO.

[cybereality]

Isn't this just like spectating in Counter-Strike?

[android78]

As far as I'm aware there's no free roaming camera option. I'm not a counter strike player though, so correct me if I'm wrong.

[RED]

Free-roaming cam is supported in many games' multiplayer spectator mode. The Unreal Tournament (all of them) series are great examples...... Which, coincidentally you can use very easily with the rift. Heck, UT3 support is launch-ready from what I gather.

I would love to eventually see a TV network get into some 360-degree live feeds (people are already doing live 360-degree streaming video, btw) for sporting events and suspend the cameras in various places in the stadiums. (field level, etc..) As HMD tech matures and they become more mainstream, I could see this offered as a pay-per-view option.

[STRZ]

Assuming that there will be future VR-Sports games like a VR tennis, football, basketball etc. it would be very cool if those environments (the stadium) would be interactive, with the ability to move freely inside the stadium and taking a seat. Let's say, if you connect to the server as spectator, you start outside the stadium in front of the ticket office

The virtual cinema another guy here in the forum is doing is going in that direction already.

Exept walking around, it could also be done in real world environments, imagine if clubs install wide FOV stereo cameras with headtracking capabilities inside their stadiums, letting you log in over the internet and watch a match like you would be there. I mean, it often happens that fans of a particular team don't live in the town where the team is based. It could be a huge benefit for teams who run out of stadium capacity. I'd clearly prefer VR spectation to watching the match in the TV.

[spire8989]

As far as I'm aware there's no free roaming camera option. I'm not a counter strike player though, so correct me if I'm wrong.

There definitely is. It's called HLTV or Half-Life TV. It lets you watch live matches in progress from a free-roaming camera perspective. Normally with a 10 minute delay or so, so you can't cheat and tell players where the other team is. Normally you'd start a stream of a shoutcaster in the background separately, this let's you choose whatever shoutcaster(s) you prefer as well.

I look forward to spectating with the rift though, it will be fun.