Manchester City, the English Premier League (EPL) football club, is building the first digital stadium, its iconic 53,400-capacity Etihad Stadium, in the metaverse.
The football club signed a three-year partnership with virtual reality experts Sony. The alliance will leverage the virtual reality, image analysis, and skeletal-tracking technologies of Sony’s subsidiary company, Hawk-Eye.
Hawk-eye is a leading vision processing company in sports. It provides officiating, production, video management, broadcast, and digital solutions that make games fairer, safer, and more engaging.
It will help officials make in-game judgments in real-time with specialized replay technology. Its visualization techniques will be used to recreate the dimensions of the Etihad Stadium in the metaverse.
Although the digital project is still at an early stage, virtual reality specialists have done a physical assessment of the Etihad stadium to map out its digital version.
Manchester City expects this new development to help it increase its revenue due to its large fanbase on the internet; Also, while speaking on the many benefits of the metaverse, the Football’s Club chief marketing and engagement officer added that “The whole point we could imagine of having a metaverse is you can recreate a game, you could watch the game live, you’re part of the action in a different way through different angles, and you can fill the stadium as much as you want because it’s unlimited, it’s completely virtual.”
Furthermore, there are indications that the club is considering letting players and fans meet in the metaverse while also possibly purchasing virtual club products unavailable in the physical world with cryptocurrencies.
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Image Source – Manchester City
