Baseball is back — with virtual crowds to fill up empty stadiums

By Allison Matyus July 23, 2020

After months of uncertainty, baseball is finally starting back up again — but this time the stadiums will look much different than we are used to.

Fox Sports will add “virtual fans” to its Major League Baseball (MLB) game broadcasts, starting when the Milwaukee Brewers take on the Chicago Cubs at 10 a.m. PT on Saturday, July 25. The lifelike fans are made a reality in collaboration with Silver Spoon Animation and SMT by using pixotope software to create photorealistic graphics.

No fans? Not on FOX Sports.

Thousands of virtual fans will attend FOX’s MLB games this Saturday. pic.twitter.com/z9oQU0rYuC

— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) July 23, 2020

The MLB season officially starts today, July 23, about four months after the season was originally scheduled to begin in lateMarch. To fans watching from home, games won’t look much different thanks to the new technology, but the stands will remain empty in reality, and no one will be catching any foul balls.

Other professional sports leagues are scheduled to start playing again, and there have been plenty of creative ways to solve the problem of empty stadiums. Japanese firm Yamaha came up with the idea of using an app and a bunch of loudspeakers to fill a venue with the noise of fans while you’re watching from home. Fans can tap on a number of preset responses offered on the app, such as applause, cheers, and jeers, to express their feelings as the game unfolds.

Televised Premier League soccer matches were augmented with digital crowd noise, despite the empty seats still being shown on the screen.

A baseball team in Japan even used Boston Dynamics robots to bring some life to its empty stadiums by providing midgame entertainment for fans watching at home.

While the camaraderie of being around other devoted fans cheering on your team is an essential part of the sports game experience, a survey by ESPN in May suggested U.S. sports fans are cool with watching televised events without spectators.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Tech News

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…

Computing

How Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to take on Apple

An Intel Meteor Lake system-on-a-chip.

It seems like Apple might need to watch out, because Intel and Microsoft are coming for it after the latter two companies reportedly forged a close partnership during the development of Intel Lunar Lake chips. Lunar Lake refers to Intel's upcoming generation of mobile processors that are aimed specifically at the thin and light segment. While the specs are said to be fairly modest, some signs hint that Lunar Lake may have enough of an advantage to pose a threat to some of the best processors.

Today's round of Intel Lunar Lake leaks comes from Igor's Lab. The system-on-a-chip (SoC), pictured above, is Intel's low-power solution made for thin laptops that's said to be coming out later this year. Curiously, the chips weren't manufactured on Intel's own process, but on TSMC's N3B node. This is an interesting development because Intel typically sticks to its own fabs, and it even plans to sell its manufacturing services to rivals like AMD. This time, however, Intel opted for the N3B node for its compute tile.

Computing

How much does an AI supercomputer cost? Try $100 billion

A Microsoft datacenter.

It looks like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora, among other projects, are about to get a lot more juice. According to a new report shared by The Information, Microsoft and OpenAI are working on a new data center project, one part of which will be a massive AI supercomputer dubbed "Stargate." Microsoft is said to be footing the bill, and the cost is astronomical as the name of the supercomputer suggests -- the whole project might cost over $100 billion.

Spending over $100 billion on anything is mind-blowing, but when put into perspective, the price truly shows just how big a venture this might be: The Information claims that the new Microsoft and OpenAI joint project might cost a whopping 100 times more than some of the largest data centers currently in operation.

Computing

There’s an unexpected, new competitor in PC gaming

Snapdragon's X Elite PC SoC.

Windows gaming on ARM is becoming a legitimate possibility, and it's not just thanks to the recently unveiled emulation options, but it's chiefly due to the fact that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is shaping up to be pretty excellent. Spotted in a recent benchmark, the CPU was seen beating some of the best processors on the current market. Are we finally at a point where it's not always going to be a choice between just Intel and AMD?

The benchmarks were posted by user @techinmul on Twitter, and the results couldn't be more promising for the upcoming Qualcomm processor. The chip was tested in Geekbench 6, and although it's important not to take these results entirely at face value, it's an impressive show of performance that bodes well for upcoming thin and light laptops.