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With crowds back watching pro baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, and other sports (and in increasing numbers) as pandemic restrictions loosen up and vaccinations rates climb, Quintar has picked a good time to announce a company specializing in sports tech.
Today, Quintar announced its Q.reality platform, which deals with stats; AR portrayals of the court, course, or field (any playing surface, really); and so on. The goal is to enable folks to dive deeper in stats, create sports content, or provide other quality-of-life improvements to the live-game experience. Q.reality is platform-agnostic, so the idea is that it would work with a variety of AR devices.
Its founders are CEO Dr. Sankar “Jay” Jayaram and Dr. Jeff Jonas, Quintar’s president and chief business officer. Its team includes people who have worked at NBA Digital, Turner Sports, Sportsvision, and Magic Leap.
Serving fans with interactivity
Quintar says Q.reality combines long-range registration and stereoscopic livestreaming. That’s how it can place AR content on a playing surface, and also how content creators, teams and media folks, and other users make “personalized, socialized, and gamified” content for fans on mobile, TVs, and AR wearables. Viewers can enjoy this either at the venue (say, Fenway Park) or at home (or your local sports bar, your brother’s house on game day, and so on). The company says you can also integrate things such as ecommerce, betting (which is becoming bigger in sports as leagues make partnerships with established bookmakers), games, and NFT marketplaces into the platform.
I asked Quintar if I could do something like this: I’m watching the Oakland A’s-Los Angeles Angels game on NBC Sports Bay Area. Could I take a moment where the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani (the two-way sensation from Japan who’s one of the most exciting stories in baseball) strikes out against Oakland pitcher Sean Manaea, add a big red strikeout symbol to it, and share the at-bat?
Affirmative, Jayaram said over email.
An example the CEO shared is how fans watching a football game at home could project the live feed on a tabletop, providing a second screen which they could use to showcase stats, graphics, and other interesting content (such as diagramming a play as it’s happening).
When it comes to personal stats, I asked if you could use the app to pull up information such as Angels great Mike Trout’s rate at swinging at fastballs high in the zone and overlay that into the feed.
“Exactly. The ability to sort, choose, and display the stats that are meaningful to you,” Jayaram said.
Adding enjoyment in layers
Other AR apps and platforms enable you to overlay virtual tidbits on sports feeds. I wanted to know how Q.reality stood out from other AR sports technologies.
“There is no other technology that would allow any fan at any seat the ability to experience layers of content with AR at a sporting event. Broadcasters can do 1st-and-10 (Jeff Jonas did most of those deals), but the ability for a fan in the seats to ‘see’ things like 1st-and-10 through the lens of their phone using Quintar tech has not been done,” he said.
And that’s important, because sometimes, where you’re sitting offers a lousy view, making it hard to see where the 1st-down markers are. Or maybe your eyesight is good enough to see the field and the players, but you have trouble with those small hashmarks. Or you struggle with seeing the ball when it’s in the air — Q.reality could, conceivably, add an AR layer to help you track the pigskin as it travels from quarterback to wideout or tight end.
Or maybe it comes with an integration that give you the odds of your team making a 1st down … and a way to bet on it.
Quintar’s backers include sports tech venture capital firm SeventySix Capital, Cowles Company, Assam Ventures, and Pragya Ventures.
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