Hi, I’m Andre Lorenceau, CEO & Founder of LiveLike. I have previously worked on launch content for the GearVR in South Korea with InnerspaceVR for Samsung, LiveLike has an elite team founding team mixing VR expertise, award winning design, award winning console development, sports production and is here to change the world of sports forever.
You may have noticed in recent time that many sports teams, leagues, and even broadcasters are conducting virtual reality tests, some of them boasting different things such as “the ability to be there” and “to change your seat in the stadium.” Features like that are cool and definitely worth experiencing; however, they fall short of VR’s potential as a medium and ultimately short of what consumers will expect in order to turn to VR.
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The vast majority of current VR experiences are 180 or 360 video, some of which include light 3D augmentation and while others even have 3D tech that is genuinely good at giving the user the feeling that you are next to the home plate or goal post. These are nice but they have one big problem: users want to take off the headset after 10 minutes.
The reason there is simple. When you watch sports, do you turn off your cell phone? Do you tell your friend to shut up and focus intensely on the game? No! The consumer behavior when watching sports (which is very different from watching, say, a drama series on HBO) is constantly interrupted by our beloved cell phones, or by our friends who are constantly laughing and smack talking. We’re sharing replays, talking about the highlights on social media, and checking fantasy points. The modern day sports viewer doesn’t just simply watch sports. This shouldn’t change because of VR; however, the most current VR sports experiences isolate us too much from these things we know and love. These shortfalls are just some of the reasons LiveLike was needed.
The company started because I loved VR and wanted to use this new, exciting medium to relive the college football game day experience (go University of Texas!) while I was thousands of miles away working in Korea. I introduced Virtual Reality and the headset to my brother in France, and together we came up with a prototype, built a team, and are now looking to make this technology available for all. As we started building the product, we realized that we wanted to have a sports experience that would allow you to watch the game with your friends as if they were next to you. You could share that amazing field goal, those statistics, that replay, and that tweet, all from inside the stadium, no matter where you are around the world.
How does that work? I could tell you that it is our suite system and mixed reality features — that it’s a live action video feed combined with a 3D rendered environment — but that wouldn’t explain much. In short, to truly get it, like most VR experiences, you just have to try it. What I can tell you is that what is needed is an understanding of VR as a new medium and to accept that it will be radically different from your TV experience in every way. The 180/360 experiences are basically TV thinking brought into VR and that just isn’t enough.
I won’t claim that we have all the answers. What we had five months ago was a joke compared to what we have now, and what we’ll have five months from now will make what we have now look like a joke as well. But even if we were to fail, everyone knows at LiveLike that we have tracked the direction that VR needs to take if we want to convince consumers to watch a full game in Virtual Reality for any lasting length of time.