Sydney Sixers Bring VR, AR Initiatives To Australian Cricket

The Sydney Sixers are bringing Australian cricket into virtual reality.

Working with Australian VR studio CatalystVR, the team, which competes in the domestic Big Bash League, gave fans a 360-degree match day experience at Sydney Cricket Ground, according to a release from Catalyst. But that was last year.

Expanding on that move’s success, the Sixers partnered again with Catalyst to let fans stand in against a fast bowl from players from the Sixers’ men’s and women’s teams. Screens next to the virtual reality setup showed fans around the stadium what those who stepped into the experience were actually seeing.

“We wanted to give viewers the exact perspective that a Batter would have as they face a fast bowl. With the cricket balls traveling at over 100km/h we had to create our own camera rigs to capture the footage and new CGI techniques to animate the VR environment,” Gabriel Howard, CatalystVR’s head of production, said in the release.

Expanding on that virtual reality program, the Daily Telegraph opened an activation site that picked contestants to “Hit a Six” (hit the ball over the boundary in the air) to win $2,000. Facing a bowler, contestants had six tries to “Hit a Six” in a VR cricket environment.

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More recently, in December, the Sydney Sixers launched an augmented reality campaign—again, with Catalyst VR—to start the seventh season of Big Bash League. The campaign revolves around a new Sixers AR app, Catalyst announced. The free app, available for iOS and Android devices, allows fans to point their cameras at stickers on the concourse at Sydney Cricket Ground and activate augmented reality versions of members of the Sixers’ men’s and women’s teams.

“AR has seen a meteoric rise over the last 12 months—Pokémon Go introduced AR to millions of kids who are now completely comfortable with the technology,” Howard said in the announcement. “And the recent releases of ARkit and ARcore have opened up exciting new opportunities for marketers.”

The augmented reality experience debuted in a full-page ad the Sixers took out in the Telegraph, showing a men’s and women’s cricketer smashing a cricket ball into your screen.

> How cool! We've launched our very own AR App!

Check it out for yourself with today's full-page ad in the @dailytelegraph or download this PDF to get started > https://t.co/cA4s7AcO6d

Tweet us your pics using the App and we'll RT the best ones #smashemsixers pic.twitter.com/WgQNp7TBbW

— Sydney Sixers (@SixersBBL) December 1, 2017