Japan Aims for High-Tech World Cup in Football

Japan is ready to enhance sports event broadcasts in its bid for the 2022 World Cup, reports PC World. Forget about 3D television; Japan’s bid to host the World Cup brings ultra-realistic holographic broadcasts of matches, virtual camera technology that would allow viewers to follow the game from almost any angle, and smartphone-like devices that will provide automatic translation.

The technological focus is unusual for a World Cup bid, which typically centers on stadiums, transportation, accommodation capacities, and other logistics necessary to host the world’s largest sporting event. Japan believes it has already proven itself in this area when it co-hosted the World Cup in 2002 with South Korea.

Suminori Gokoh, the chief executive of Japan’s 2022 bid committee, stated in an interview that their intention is to bring the joy of football to the entire world, not just the host country. Japan intends to enable public holographic displays of matches for gathered fans in all 208 FIFA member countries. They plan for fans to gather in stadiums around the world and watch holographic projections of players on the field. The goal is to provide fans with an experience as close as possible to watching a live match. Japan also plans virtual camera technology that would allow viewers in front of TV sets to fly around the field and watch the game from all angles. ‘It’s not just like being in the stadium, but like being on the field,’ Gokoh said. ‘You can choose any angle you want to see, player actions, referees, goals… Everything.’

Japan is also planning another application that will help fans communicate with an automatic translator – which is like a real version of the universal translator from ‘Star Trek’ and will provide them with various information. ‘We are using devices like the iPhone and have developed an application that will allow people to have all the information about the live match,’ Gokoh said.

Takuto Maruyama, the executive director of the bid committee, stated that they were able to demonstrate at the presentation how 60,000 people in the stadium would be able to see 3D images with the naked eye without the use of special glasses. The FIFA delegation did not reveal how the bid was received, but the technological aspects were recognized. Harold Mayne-Nicholls, the chief delegate, stated that the Japanese bid is a very balanced project that combines football tradition, modern stadiums, and new technologies that include eco-projects and integration with the world. FIFA will decide on the host country for the 2022 World Cup on December 2 of this year.

A big question for Japan is whether it can realize these high-tech dreams. Of course, Japan cannot immediately reproduce these technologies, but they have gathered a coalition of companies, research institutions, and universities that could develop them. The leader of the coalition is Jun Murai, a professor at Tokyo’s Keio University and one of Japan’s most renowned computer experts, known as the ‘father of the Japanese internet.’ This technological advancement would certainly be significant, and therefore we must wish good luck to the Japanese bid.    (Z. S.)