mobiles to enhance the live sports experience

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council I Case study 18

MOBILES TO ENHANCETHE LIVE SPORTSEXPERIENCE

≥29.9mTotal attendance at PremierLeague and Football Leaguegames in 2008/09.

Imagine watching a football match, seeing a foul and being able toimmediately swap comments with friends who saw the same incidentfrom the other side of the stadium.

By allowing mobile phones tocommunicate with each other withoutsending messages via a network,new technology will enable people indifferent parts of a stadium to sharebanter, photos and video clips instantly,reliably – and free of charge.

IMPACT ON CONNECTION> By allowing fans to swap banter and

photos instantly, new technology willadd an extra dimension to the livesports experience – an industry worthmore than £500m to the UK economy.

> Mobile-to-mobile communicationscould assist emergency healthcare, byallowing people at an accident sceneto communicate with each other evenin areas without network coverage.

Making the connectionCurrently it can be hard to get a mobilephone signal in a crowded sports stadiumwhere there is a lot of interference. Evenif a signal is obtained, messages can takea long time to be delivered to therecipient’s mobile.

With EPSRC funding, researchers at theUniversity of Glasgow have developed aseries of computer programs that makeso-called ‘ad hoc networking’ possible forany number of fans wanting to swapthoughts with each other at a live event.

The application makes innovative use ofshort range communications allowing afan’s phone to connect with up to sevenother users at the same time, withoutusing mobile phone masts. They dothis by harnessing Bluetooth, a well-established form of wireless networking.

However, ad hoc networking has neverbeen used before for direct phone-to-phone communication in real-worldsettings. The programs are the first toenable recent advances in ad hocnetworking to be applied to phone-basedend-user applications. They simply haveto be installed onto standard iPhones tomake mobile communications faster andmore direct.

“Chat and banter need to be immediate,”says Dr Matthew Chalmers, who isleading the project. “If a disputed goalis scored or a yellow card awarded,you want to hear what others have tosay about it straight away, from theirvantage point in the stadium. Directmobile-to-mobile communicationcan make this possible.”

Extending social networks“It’s really about extending a SocialNetworking philosophy to sports stadiaand giving spectators a richer experience.”

If picked up by industry, the newtechnology could start reaching themarket within the next year or two.

In the long-term, mobile-to-mobilecommunications could play an importantrole in assisting emergency healthcare,by allowing people at an accident sceneto communicate with each other even inareas remote from a mobile phone mast.

For more information aboutEPSRC and the impact it is makingvisit www.impactworld.org.uk

≥1.8bnNumber of worldwide mobilephone owners in 2004.Source: ESRC

≥£554mPremier League matchdayrevenue in 2007/08.Source: Deloitte

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EVOLVING THEMOBILE

COMMUNICATIONSINDUSTRY

Engineering and Physical SciencesResearch Council

www.epsrc.ac.uk

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