Skybox Turns Glass Into A Sport Lover’s Must Have
Until now Glass has proven itself to be a very high potential device and every developer that got in touch with it tried to improve its software by adding some of his own experience. From the app series What could Glass display comes a new software for sport fans (hockey fans more exactly) that delivers a new kind of experience, called Skybox.
Watching a hockey game from a good perspective is definitely a challenge, as keeping up with what each player did is pretty difficult, not to mention that an enthusiastic fan would like to be able to take part of the game by cheering, hearing the skates move on ice and watching his favorite players do their game, which is pretty hard to obtain in a crowded stadium. This is where Glass comes in with its new app –it would be completely inconvenient to look at your smartphone during a game because you could instantly loose track of the small puck and the entire purpose of watching a live game.
The idea of Skybox came as an attempt to deliver a new and unique experience for all the fans that choose to watch live hockey games at the hockey arena. And considering that the Verizon Center from Washington DC is equipped with the best hardware that can easily process videos from the hockey arena and distribute it to all the sportscasters that emit outside the stadium, the editing team could as well create content that can be instantly delivered to fans witnessing the game at the arena. The app is still in trial, but we believe hockey fans would be more than enthusiastic to use it.
In its beta version, Skybox can already deliver a quick look at every detail of the game: scores, stats for players (from both teams) and all this in real time without having to take your eyes away from the ice. As a plus, every time a player scores, you receive a notification with all the concerning details and you could take shots from the game, send them or distribute them on social environments. In the near future, there’s a plan on including hash-tags so that you could tag the game your at. But probably the best feature in the app is that users are allowed to see highlight content as it is being edited in the Verizon Center.
If you’re not a hockey fan, you might not understand why it is so awesome to be able to replay a video of an event that just happened before your eyes, but trust us: being able to review a move through every camera angle in the arena is thrilling. This is why the app allows users to select a camera angle and see the highlight from there and if wanted, they could replay the video from every available angle. And the best part is that at the arena, the editing team was pulling the highlight videos at just a minute after the action happened, so that they could re-watch the action while the ice was cleaned for the next game.
According to APX Labs, those who created the application, not everyone owning a Glass can also use their software, mainly because this is still a beta version but also because it requires a modified version of Glass’s software.
The application can only be used inside the arena and the Verizon Center is testing it with half a dozen devices, but everyone who tried it seem to be enthusiastic about it and the results have been positive. Besides, Skybox opens new exploration opportunities for Glass and brings it closer to a market that might have not interacted with it otherwise.