What kind of 18 year old in 2015 wouldn’t want to try out virtual reality? The appeal is undeniable—and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is trying to exploit it as a recruiting tool.
The UNLV recruiting team partnered with EON Sports VR and YouVisit VR to create a virtual reality tour of the school, which includes both 360-degree still-shots of campus buildings, practice huddles, coin tosses, and the football locker room.
Drew Jennison, UNLV’s recruiting coordinator, said to the Las Vegas Sun, “Some guys aren’t that excited by [a building], but they’re excited when they look at it [through the virtual reality headset]. It’s a cool way to show a not-so-cool thing.”
UNLV’s new first-year head coach, Tony Sanchez, is all for this method of recruiting with both flare and substance. Although they have not had the technology long enough to show many recruits thus far, Sanchez and Jennison plan on coaches bringing headsets on recruiting trips. Additionally, if the NCAA allows it, they will send out some headsets through the mail for potential players to virtually visit campus without having to leave their living rooms.
The UNLV recruiting team thinks that this technology will eventually become pretty widespread in the sports recruiting world, which is not at all crazy to think. YouVisit VR, the free application that the tour runs through, already has thousands of partnerships with colleges for regular student tours, and EON Sports VR obviously already caters virtual reality to the sports world.
Even so, UNLV is perfectly satisfied with using the technology to their advantage for the time being: “A year from now, if every team has this, it’s not that crazy. But for right now, for a lot of these guys it’s their first experience,” said Jennison.
And they’re still far from done with the tour’s development—they plan on adding Sanchez’s voice to guide the tour, and they also want to add new videos (which could even include shots from Las Vegas’ sites of interest). And with EON Sport VR’s excitement for the partnership, it’s hard to see this technology’s evolution coming to a halt.
And why should the use of this VR technology slow down? As Dennison said, “New uniforms, new field—what cooler way to show it off?”