New NBA app Ai and Parallel Reality from Intuit Dome

We’re all NBA in today’s Power Up, which also provides a great segue into today’s SBJ Live – RS End: The State of Regional Broadcasting at the Start of the NBA Season. Be sure to log in and tune in. – Ethan Joyce

In today’s edition of Power Up:

• NBA describes new app features
• Try Intuit Dome’s Parallel Reality
• Voice of the Athlete: Gordon Hayward

The NBA is rolling out several updates to its flagship app ahead of the 2024-25 season, including two new artificial intelligence-powered features.

The first is a generative AI feature called NBA Insights, which is powered by an integration with Microsoft Azure. Insights summarize in-game developments in real time and appear as text bullets in a tab on a game’s dedicated page, along with other box score, highlights and play-by-play log modules.

“It’s an ongoing, real-time analysis feed in chronological order and seeks to highlight the game’s most compelling narratives,” NBA senior vice president and head of product and platform Chad Evans told SBJ. “We have seen this many times [Victor Wembanyama] Last year he had all these amazing games where he had 33 points and 15 rebounds and 7 blocks and 7 assists – and you want to know, ‘Hey, has this happened before?’ And by who?’ The design of the Insights feature is to incorporate all the statistical data and let the AI ​​surface compelling storylines.”

Also new to the app this year is the Dunk Score, a scoring system that combines AI and pose player tracking data collected by Hawk-Eye to generate points for particularly strong throws. Charlie Rohlf, NBA VP/Stats Technology Product Development, said dunk scores are calculated by weighting more than 25 different characteristics of a dunk, which generally fall into four categories: bounce, power, style and defensive competition.

“Some of them [the factors] are very simple – like how high the ball is or how high the player jumps vertically,” said Rohlf. “Some are much deeper. What was the collision force between the offensive player and a defensive player? How much did her body rotate during the dunk? Did the player pull his back behind his head to give the dunk more style points?”

App users can expect to see Dunk Score graphics over highlight videos or stills from select games. The highest-scoring dunk of the 2023-24 season – the NBA’s first to use Hawk-Eye tracking data – was an Anthony Edwards poster by Utah Jazz forward John Collins, which earned a score of 124.4 . According to NBA data, Edwards flew 9.9 feet from the basket, had a vertical height of 44.4 inches, was in the air for 0.5 seconds and rammed the ball past the rim at 29.2 mph.

Additional app updates include:

• Localized game summaries and translations of selected original content and live action in French, Portuguese and Spanish, created with generative AI.
• Live scoreboards for games that update with sub-second latency and feature a real-time ticking clock, according to NBA SVP and Head of Consumer Experience Jay Lee.
• Advanced multiview functionality for connected devices, allowing fans to watch two to four games simultaneously on their TVs, mobile devices or tablets.

The NBA app was a finalist for “Best in Fan Experience Technology” at the Sports Business Awards: Tech last year. Nominations are open for this year’s nine SBA: Tech Awards. These include expanded categories for both venue and immersive technology, as well as a brand new award – Next in Sports Tech: Rising Female Leader, presented by Next League. The nomination window closes on October 21st.

Monday night marked the first basketball game for Intuit Dome, the sparkling new jewel of an arena envisioned by Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. His vision was to equip the building with enough high-tech infrastructure so that fans wouldn’t have to fiddle with equipment themselves and just concentrate on basketball.

SBJ’s Joe Lemire visited the new venue to test the parallel reality developed by Misapplied Sciences, giving each fan a tailor-made visit.

Gordon Hayward retired from the NBA this summer after a 14-year career in which he averaged more than 15 points per game and made the All-Star team with the Utah Jazz in 2016-17.

Although he was an above-average shooter – Hayward made 1,111 three-pointers in his career for a .370 percentage – he was always looking for new ways to improve, which led him to an entrepreneur named Charlie Wallace. The 34-year-old Hayward and his former Butler teammate Emerson Kampen acquired most of Wallace’s company, redesigned some things and renamed it the form they launched this month.

He spoke with Lemire for the latest edition of Athlete’s Voice.