(Courtesy of Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology)
Six months after officially opening, and the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology at Indiana University has its first virtual reality game, which was led by senior Catherine Onofrey.
Onofrey, who is an intern with the Cuban Center, first became interested in virtual reality after taking a 300 level 3D Computer Graphics class in Indiana’s School of Arts and Sciences.
She spearheaded the virtual basketball game that gives users the virtual feel of shooting baskets inside Assembly Hall. The virtual reality initiative was part of Onofrey’s 2016 fall semester capstone project in the School of Informatics and Computing.
“I presented the idea to (the Cuban Center) and we kind of came up with the idea of doing a basketball fan experience,” Onofrey said to IUHoosiers.com. “So then with that, we just kind of ran with creating Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall in a VR environment.”
Through the Cuban Center, Onofrey utilized available software, equipment and production technology to develop the game while HTC Vive headsets were also integrated into the experience. With the Vive and using controllers, users can pick up a basketball from a ball rack and shoot three throws, launch a half court short or walk around Branch McCracken Court. While immersed in the virtual game, gamers will also see information and statistics about players from the Indiana University basketball family.
Now, Onofrey and the Cuban Center hope to make the game publicly available for those consumers and fans who have a HTC Vive headset and Steam software, which was used to create the game.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who donated $5 million to Indiana in 2015 to launch the Center, has critiqued virtual reality as of late.
On a recent SportTechie Podcast episode, Cuban discussed with host Bram Weinstein the current state of the new medium, its shortcomings and the different use applications, which includes training purposes for professional and college athletes along with live entertainment.
“Watching a live event is very, very difficult in VR particularly with the low-end goggles because depth perception is very difficult and switching between cameras is very difficult,” Cuban said on the podcast. “NextVR does as good if not a better job than everybody but it’s still difficult to follow a game. It’s not something that people say, ‘You know what, I’d much rather watch it.’ Now, the easy response is that it will change over time as phones and devices become more capable but it takes more than just the phones. There’s the cameras, there’s the switching, there’s the stitching. There’s so many different things that I think we’re years away. It’s almost like the streaming industry with poster stamp-size video because of bandwidth availability. We’ll go through that same performance curve.”
