Scott Cunningham/NBA Entertainment
Courtside seats for this Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game in New York City’s Madison Square Garden are selling for around $9,000 a pop.
But if you have a Samsung Gear VR headset, the NBA is providing a way to get even closer to the action, and for much less money. No money at all, in fact.
The NBA announced today that it will be capturing the All-Star Game, the three-point contest, the dunk competition, and a private practice session for the dunk-contest participants using a pair of virtual-reality camera rigs from BigLook360 for All-Star weekend.
While other companies have conducted their own live VR-broadcast tests, this All-Star weekend footage won’t be streamed live. NBA Vice President of Global Media Distribution Jeff Marsilio says the footage will be available through the Samsung Milk VR store in a few weeks’ time—for free.
Marsilio says the camera crews are still experimenting with different rig locations for each event—front-row seats for the game itself, a scorers’ table view for the dunk competition, and a baseline setup for the three-point contest, for example—but the goal is to provide a realistic immersive experience.
“We’re shooting the slam-dunk practice, which I think is going to be really interesting,” says Marsilio. “It’s basically an empty gym for the players to practice their signature dunks. VR is amazing for big spectator events, but it’s also great for those kind of intimate access moments. You see somebody in a location where you couldn’t even buy a ticket for. You feel like you’re there.”
There aren’t any current plans to release the full unedited video of each event. Instead, the best moments will be compiled into 360-degree highlight reels, although in these early stages of the VR game, the NBA still isn’t sure exactly what a highlight reel will look like.
“We’re going to be experimenting with what a highlight package really is in virtual reality,” Marsilio says. “It’s not a cut for 8 seconds, a cut for 8 seconds… It’s going to be more contextualized.”
Due to that immersive sense of context, Marsilio thinks the upcoming video packages will have a lot of replay value. The first time through, a viewer may just focus on a dunk-competition competitor, but then rewatch the footage in different directions to see the reaction of courtside celebrities, other competitors, and the judges.
The NBA has done VR tests in the past with another company, NextVR, and Marsilio says that footage may be available on Milk VR before the All-Star weekend packages. Those videos include courtside footage shot during an October preseason game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat, as well as a Samsung-sponsored series of NBA practice footage called “Keys to the Game.”
But one thing you probably won’t see in the All-Star VR spectacular is footage of a player jumping over a VR camera rig for a dunk. At least not yet.
“Maybe next year,” Marsilio says with a laugh. “Given that we’re still exploring what works in VR, we’re not really ready to bring it to a player and say hey, mess with this in your dunk preparations.”
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