Reducing the frequency and severity of injuries, particularly concussions, is priority No. 1 for the NFL right now. Punter Chris Kluwe, who in his playing days was never hesitant to say what he thought the league ought to be doing differently, thinks he might have a solution.
At the TED conference in Vancouver this week, Kluwe gave a talk about how he believes augmented reality is about to change the way most sports are played, and the way fans see them. Kluwe is a member of the Google Glass Explorer program, and even wore his Glass during a training camp stint with the Oakland Raiders. After his talk, I caught up with him for a one-on-one.
Here's how Kluwe sees AR playing out in football: Before the ball is snapped, a quarterback scans the defense. His helmet-mounted computer, seeing the alignment of linebackers and linemen, notifies him, via a heads-up projection on his visor, that this look means it's 85% likely he'll have one-on-one coverage on his primary receiver. The center snaps the ball, and the QB's display flashes red on the left to warn him of a blindside rusher coming free. He unloads the ball just in time, hitting his receiver, who has indeed beaten his only defender.
I have a hard time buying this scenario, for the reason that I can't see the NFL allowing technology to influence the outcome of plays to such a significant degree. After all, the league only just started letting coaches use tablet computers on the sidelines to replace Polaroids and laminated play sheets. Helmet radios have been around for decades but their use is still restricted to one player per side and they have to cut off 15 seconds before the play starts.
But Kluwe insists that the economic incentives are too tempting too ignore. "The reason the league will allow it is because it raises the quality of the product on the field," he told me.
An unprecedented degree of parity is often cited as one of the main factors in professional football's success relative to other American sports, but you still get blowouts like the Seahawks 43-8 destruction of the Broncos in this year's Super Bowl. "It was one of the lower watched Super Bowls of the last few years because no one was watching after the second quarter," noted Kluwe. What if the Broncos had had some technology that offset Seattle's physical edge? "Now, all of a sudden, it's a back-and-forth struggle and people are invested in the outcome."
Eh...maybe. I think it would be a hard sell. What I don't think would be a hard sell at all -- what could, in fact, be just the inducement the NFL needs to get over its technophobia -- is the other scenario Kluwe proffers, the one wherein helmet-mounted AR systems are "warning players when they're entering a dangerous situation" and thereby eliminating traumatic collisions. Kluwe:
Say you’re going across the middle and you don’t know there’s a guy coming up to lay you out. An even better example would be that right now defensive players really don’t know where they’re supposed to hit someone. They can’t go high, they can’t go low. It’s like, well, what do we do? With augmented reality, you could be looking at your tackle box: Here’s a green area where you can hit this guy. It’s like an airplane going down on a landing approach, going through the boxes in order to hit the right zone. Now, as a player, you’re lining up on the right zone so you know you’re hitting a spot that will keep both of you safe.
It sounds like science fiction, but it's very much in keeping with the league's current direction of R&D, he notes.
They’re already talking about putting stuff like accelerometers and GPS sensors in helmets to measure concussive impacts. If you have something like that in your helmet, say you go on a play where you get cracked going across the middle, now it’s flashing red and telling you, 'You need to get out of the game. You have a concussion.' And it’s not just telling you -- it’s telling your trainers on the sideline. From a medical perspective, you can diagnose it instantly and prevent those injuries that happen when a player refuses to come out of the game, because no player’s going to take himself out of the game. You risk losing your job.
Some sort of in-helmet technology will almost certainly find its way onto the field in coming years as the league seeks to ward off the existential threat of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But for players to have screens in their visors telling them in real time how to play the game -- isn't that a bit antithetical to the spirit of sports?
"It depends on what level of technological innovation you want in your sport," Kluwe says. "If we were playing true football, we’d all be wearing leather helmets with no facemasks. We’d be wearing work boots and cloth pants and jerseys. We wouldn’t have any pads, and we’d be dying out on the field. Technology in sports is always evolving."
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Note: My headline and Kluwe's talk both elided a distinction that Google tries to make when talking about Glass: It's not technically augmented reality. Because the screen sits above the eye, not directly in front of it, uses don't see an overlay on the physical world as they would in the scenarios Kluwe articulates. Kluwe says he considers Glass a step toward the NFL's AR future.
