How this new AR technology is putting MLB games into the hands of fans
By Paul Mueller
While the world is fixated on the global AI craze and the ensuing land grab, an emerging AR technology is quietly gaining traction and it promises to change the way fans interact with sporting events—and maybe how brands connect with fans—forever.
ARound, part of Stagwell, a global marketing and technology company, has created the world’s first stadium-scale shared augmented reality platform, which enables users to interact with the physical world and digital content simultaneously, all through their phones.
Many professional sports, specifically Major League Baseball, have struggled to engage young fans both in person and at home, competing with phones and shorter attention spans. To offer more immersive fan experiences, last week, the Kansas City Royals became the third professional sports team to implement ARound’s technology, joining the Los Angeles Rams and Minnesota Twins, which piloted the platform in 2022.
“It’s no longer just peanuts and Cracker Jack,” says Tony Snethen, Royals vice president of brand innovation. “It’s about trying to bring new experiences into that experience. We know that baseball is struggling in that regard, and I think technology is the answer.”
Fans can access the Royals’s “Crown Vision AR” by downloading the app. The system includes real-time integration with game action, including follow-along effects like immersive graphics that give context to on-field action and fireworks after home runs. It also features a fire-breathing dragon that fans can control, mass gaming experiences, and in-venue broadcasting through the stadium’s videoboard. It will soon offer live 3D stats and play-by-play graphics for a broadcast-level experience.
ARound’s platform is built by pre-scanning the stadium to create a 3D virtual representation. This allows users to experience augmented reality content overlaid on top of the physical space, localizing content to individual users throughout the venue. By using a hyper low latency data protocol, interactions and experiences can happen without noticeable delay, creating a seamless experience. With ARound, a fan can enter the virtual world from their seat and interact with the live game—and other fans—from their unique vantage point in real time.
“We can bring everybody in the stadium into this environment simultaneously,” says Josh Beatty, founder and CEO of ARound. “We’re turning the stadium into a stage and the audience into actors and really delivering a new type of experience that is fully activated by the audience and by the action.”
ARound was founded as part of a tech incubator within Stagwell, an internal Shark Tank-style competition the company holds each year to encourage internal innovation and identify promising new marketing technologies. Winning ideas can earn $1 million in startup funding. After Beatty’s concept won in 2020, his first call was to the Twins, his hometown team.
“Up until this point, the limiting factor in AR has been that it’s a really isolating experience,” says Chris Iles, Twins senior director of brand experience and innovation. “It’s generally between a user and their phone, and once I do the facial filter or whatever, I’m kinda done with it. But what Josh was selling was really how I envisioned AR to be useful to humans, and that’s AR at scale—a shared experience where you’re participating with everyone else alongside you.”
The Twins launched ARound at Target Field in August 2022, which included a digital home run derby and a multiplayer tower-toppling competition. The team reported engagement time of more than 25 minutes per fan, which exceeds the average time of on-field action in a typical baseball game (18 minutes).
The Rams later became the first NFL team to deploy ARound at the end of the 2022 season, highlighted by a virtual snowball fight inside So-Fi Stadium on Christmas Day in which fans threw more than 42,000 virtual snowballs onto the field and at each other. Marketing the technology through their in-stadium screens, the team reported that fans who downloaded the app came back twice a game, on average.
According to Vice President and General Manager of Rams Studios, Marissa Daly, in addition to offering a shared experience among fans, part of the appeal was that ARound offered a dynamic way to increase fan engagement without the hardware and capital typically required to adopt new technology. Its adaptability was an added benefit, as it allows the team to continually evolve and create new experiences for each game.
“I think the giant razor coming out of Gillette Stadium looks really cool,” says Daly. “It’s sort of a one-and-done. Right? It’s a nice splash. It’s great on television. It’s big. It’s bold. But it’s not repeatable, right? It’s not something they’re going to do for every game. And what I think [ARound] enabled us to do was come up with unique ways to go into each game and think about the theme, think about the partners, learn what’s being used and not, and iterate it. So it’s a much smarter way, to me, to enter this [AR] space.”
The consensus among Daly and others who have implemented ARound’s platform is that the technology has allowed them to create a complementary experience rather than a competitive one. Rather than compete with the phone for fans’ attention, they built something that gets fans on their phone while keeping them in the game. On a scale of Snapchat filters to the Metaverse, ARound falls smack in the middle—a complementary experience that allows fans to interact with the physical world and digital content simultaneously, recapturing traditionally distracted and disengaged fans.
It makes sense that Major League Baseball teams are among the early adopters. The league has implemented a number of rule changes to speed up the game, and quite successfully, as games averaged 2 hours, 38 minutes through the first four days of the 2023 season (down from 3 hours, 4 minutes in 2022). One recent game lasted just one hour, 57 minutes. So while baseball’s new rules appear to be working, its lulls between batters and innings and from walks and other native procedures are unavoidable. This leaves younger fans particularly vulnerable to distraction.
There is no data available yet for Crown Vision AR, but the Royals and other adopters are already looking ahead past fan engagement to other applications, specifically the potential for brand partners and monetization. ARound’s platform could eventually offer brands and sponsors an increased number of touchpoints throughout a game through which to reach fans, all with a more immersive and interactive experience than in-stadium advertising or commercials.
“This will really open up the imagination to different kinds of sponsorships, which have really been limited in the stadium context,” says Mark Penn, chairman and CEO at Stagwell. “Somebody could have [their branding] on the uniform or on the scoreboard, but it wasn’t an interactive experience. And that, I think, is really going to make this kind of fun for the fan and also provide a new way to engage them in terms of the brands.”
“This medium hasn’t been tapped into before,” says Snethen. “If you have one of your top partners, we can create an entire gaming experience that goes back to the authenticity of whatever brand that is that we’re working with. To make that experience part of one of their brand pillars as it relates to us. And if we can use that as a teaching model in the game itself, great.”
In addition to incorporating more brands and sponsors, ARound will eventually look beyond MLB and the NFL, and could eventually extend beyond sports.
“Any place there’s an audience, we think shared augmented reality has a place,” says Beatty. “Concerts, amusement parks, even college campuses. We can really make people interact with their world and interact with each other in ways that haven’t been done before.”
Until then, the Royals and other teams adopting the technology are focused on fan engagement, providing a new experience both at home and in the stadium in the process, giving us a small glimpse into the future of AR in sports and beyond.
“This isn’t just about 162 games or 81 games for your local team,” says Snethen. “It’s trying to bring new experiences so that we can show fans that there’s potential for this to evolve over time and become a part of their daily lives. I’m just excited to see people holding their phones up for the right reason. Instead of taking a selfie, let’s educate people and have some fun.”
A founding editor of The Players’ Tribune, Paul Mueller is a freelance writer and content strategist based in Florida.
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