Before exorbitant ticket and food prices became the norm, sporting arenas were always places for some good ol’ family bonding time.
As if the excitement of the game you are watching isn’t enough, the roar of the crowd is unlike any other moment you can experience during a live event.
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Over the years the rising costs of live-sports events have sharply limited the audiences who can afford to attend.
For instance, the average cost of going to a National Football League game has risen 39% since 2013, according to the Fan Cost Index from Team Marketing Report.
For some teams, the increase is even more stark. The Las Vegas Raiders, Cleveland Browns and Tampa Bay Buccaneers franchises have each raised prices by at least 85% over that time span.
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Meanwhile, Cleveland and Las Vegas have been two of the worst franchises in the league over that span. Cleveland’s winning percentage is just 35% over the past 12 seasons, and Vegas’s isn’t much better.
Making the game more accessible for the visually impaired
Even as the games have become more cost-prohibitive for fans, the leagues are also trying to make them more accessible for an oft-neglected segment of sports fans.
Before the advent of television, everyone consumed live sports through audio. Unless you went to the game yourself, the play-by-play announcer was the only way to immerse yourself in the action.
Thanks to TV the games have centered more on the bright lights illuminating the visual product. But that leaves a potentially large cohort of people on the sidelines.
While the visually impaired can still listen to the games, a solution hasn’t been found for those who love the game and want to enjoy it live but can’t see what is actually happening on the court.
Until now.
Toumani Camara #33, Shaedon Sharpe #17 and Anfernee Simons #1 of the Portland Trail Blazers during a game against the Charlotte Hornets on Feb. 22, 2025, at the Moda Center Arena in Portland, Ore. (Photo by Cameron Browne/NBAE via Getty Images)
Cameron Browne/Getty Images
NBA’s Portland Trailblazers experiment with game-changing tech for the visually impaired
In January the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers said it became the first professional sports team to feature a so-called haptic display at all its home games.
Haptics are force-sensitive devices that enable users to experience the world around them virtually through external signals. In this case, those signals are vibrations felt through one’s fingers.
The device the Trailblazers use is a gray flat rectangular box with a scale model of the court on the device’s top surface. The user places the device on their lap and fingertips on the top surface to follow the movement of the players.
The user in a sense “feels the game.” The device lets the user know when a player shoots and alerts them if a shot is made, all through vibrations. An audio feed also tells the user the score and clock situation.
“I definitely experienced the game way better than I would’ve because I can kind of have a sense of what’s going on,” a Blazers fan, Hank Vogel, told NBC News recently.
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OneCourt, the company behind the device the TrailBlazers use, was founded by Jerred Mace, an industrial designer.
Mace got the idea for the device after watching a video of a blind man “watching” a soccer match in a stadium, using a sighted woman to describe the action to him.
Mace was in college in 2021 when he saw that video and got the inspiration for the OneCourt Haptic Display devices that the Trailblazers currently use.
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