Rocket Race and the future of Spectator Sports
RRL or Rocket Racing League is the brainchild of Peter H Diamandis -the man who spent USD 10 million to a team financed by Paul Allen. (BusinessWeek Sept 24, 2007). Rocket Race takes high speed rocket planes into space as they race. Each plane might make about 5 short pit stops in the course of the 90 minute race. As Diamandis puts it “While NASA blast offs were once in a lifetime experience for some people, I want to give them those experiences a dozen of times in an afternoon.
This cutting edge experience sits at the cusp of two industries - Tourism & Entertainment.
Here’s how they see it happening:
1. Fans at airfields would experience the thunderous roars of rockets blasting-off + giant JumboTrons to watch this all on.
2. TV networks being pursued to telecast this event – with choppers, blimps and images from racing planes
3. Real time internet feeds of GPS satellite will allow people to race virtual planes on the same racing course + the same view as the pilots get up there..
Very radical but what caught my fancy is the third point. What this augurs for the future of spectator sports. How much of spectators would be just spectators watching when they could be (and finally would be) there doing it themselves. I see a merging of Travel, Tourism, Sports, and Entertainment into a new Luxury offering (which sooner or later will not be such a preserve as it seems now).
It is not just about watching Sachin hit that six but the option of being there under the flood lights in Eden Gardens and hitting that ball from a Pakistani pacer in the 48th over. Virtual will be more and real with GPS and tactile technology working overtime to bring the experience to a joystick that will soon feel like a cricket bat. Just imagine the rush!
Are you sweating, face that ball now!
Monday, September 24, 2007
Rocket Race and the future of Spectator Sports
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2 comments:
The sport seems to be very promising and exciting. But I am so sure that the environmentalist’s would have a lot of problems with this sport if its undertaken on a large scale.
Hi Ved! You might want to look at some earlier observations posted on this Blog(Feb 21, 2007). In the long (long-long) run we would not need to worry about the environment/ecosystem.
Physical space will become less and less relevant and this would happen faster that what we expect it to be..2045 as I see it..
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