SANTA CLARA — Intel deepened its drive to digitize sports Wednesday by acquiring Replay Technologies, an Israeli company that makes a novel 3-D viewing technology called “freeD.”
The deal not only gives Intel a way to digitize athletic matches, but also a new buzz word: “immersive sports,” meaning technology that puts viewers on the playing field virtually.
Replay’s freeD technology was developed by three Israelis — an aviation engineer, a computer graphics expert and a physicist — who wanted to create views of a soccer match from the perspective of the goalie.
“We were living in the UK at the time, working for an aviation company,” said co-founder Aviv Shapira. “We tried a few things, a few tricks, and eventually Matteo, my brother, come up with the idea to reconstruct reality, giving a novel new perspective that cannot be achieved with normal cameras today.”
The technology was used recently in collaboration with Intel at the NBA All Star Weekend and the Super Bowl to capture split seconds of action on the court and field with multiple video cameras and turn them into 3-D viewable images that can be rotated like a globe.
Intel has been making a concerted push to digitize sports wherever possible, from televised broadcasts to wearables that measure an athlete’s performance or give viewers an athlete’s view of an event.
“Everything we know and experience about sports is about to change,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in a recent article for Sports Illustrated’s online magazine The Cauldron. Some of these technologies, like Replay’s, require massive computer processing power of the kind that Intel dominates.
Immersive sports is also ” fueling the continued build out of the cloud,” Wendell Brooks, who heads the strategic transactions group at Intel, said in a company blog post. Brooks said the Santa Clara chip giant “will scale this new category for sports entertainment that we call immersive sports, which is attracting the attention of leagues, venues, broadcasters and fans.”
Augmented and virtual reality were the hottest topics at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, and CES in Las Vegas, the giant conference formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, said Mark Hung, an analyst with Gartner.
But virtual reality headsets need content, Hung said. “For that, you need technology like that supplied by Replay. Once this gets more refined, people may be able to use virtual reality goggles at home, watching the Warriors play as if they were there in person,” he said.
Intel is “seeding the whole market with all kinds of stuff — wearables, and this and that for the Internet of Things,” said Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon. “It’s very fragmented and diversified, and that’s part of the problem. It’s not like the smartphone, a billion-dollar market all by itself.”
Replay has offices in Dallas and in Silicon Valley and has been in close collaboration with Intel for about a year.
The collaboration with Intel meant that Replay could use the chip giant’s powerful server technology to assemble pixels into freeD images for rapid broadcasting, a company spokesman said.
“We’re putting together millions and millions of 3-D pixels, called ‘voxels,’ to create those 3-D pictures as a game occurs,” said Replay spokesman Preston Phillips. The acquisition “gives us a lot bigger tool box to work with,” he said.
Replay CEO Oren H. Yogev, who is joining Intel as a vice president, said the deal means that “Replay will be able to focus on reaching the next level of freeD advancement, which will benefit sports and live entertainment properties around the world.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the Israeli Globes said Intel bought Replay for $175 million.
Contact Pete Carey at 408-920-5419. Follow him at Twitter.com/petecarey.
