April saw Spanish LaLiga behemoth Real Madrid launch a Virtual Reality app – which the club claim is the first for a sports team.
Titled ‘Real Madrid Virtual World’, it is a multi-device application developed with technology of Astosch in collaboration with Microsoft.
The objective is to provide an immersive, fresh way for fans from right across the planet to take a tour the Santiago Bernabéu and explore and experience the team’s history of a set of bespoke club content.
The aim is for fans to immerse themselves and ‘experience in first person the amazing experience of being where only the chosen ones can be! Experience this new way of being fan and enjoying with your favourite team in 360º and Virtual Reality thanks to The Dream VR’.
The app, connects fans across the globe in real-time and enables them to communicate with each other in a virtual stadium and thus to share the VR experience.
Thus supporters can walk through rooms in the stadium, explore the bulging trophy cabinets, see the trophies in 3D, learn all about the club’s rich past, learn about the club’s history, read player interviews alongside thousands of fresh unpublished pieces of content.
A further, inventive feature of the app offers fans a chance to create their own customised avatars and then take the tour as their avatar (and interact with other avatars through a multilingual live chat function – each user submits their preferred language and then any other visitor in the VR space receives real-time messages from other virtual visitors in their chosen language).
The VR platform was promoted through a PR push and across the Real Madrid digital and social platforms and the campaign was spearheaded by an online spot.
The app, which is available on IOS and Android (http://www.thedreamvr.com/theapp.php), can be used with any smart device, smartphone, tablet and VR glasses.
Plus, the application is also linked to the existing Real Madrid App: so users who’ve already downloaded it can access Real Madrid Virtual World through it with a single login in.
Comment:
The sports space’s obsession for VR apps continues unchecked right across the world.
The Real Madrid app follows hot on the heels of QBE’s Sydney Swans match day VR app experience in Australia’s AFL (see case study).
We still enjoy the fun of sports VR, yet we still question whether the results of such VR initiatives will stack up to the investment costs – especially now there have been so many that there is little ‘first user/leading edge’ credibility or benefit.
But we do particularly like the multi-language strand in the Spanish’s club’s offering: after all, the majority of the club’s fans are not native Spanish speakers.
This initiative continues to build on Microsoft’s Real Madrid activation heritage: which includes its ‘Passion Powers: Do You Wants More’ initiative back in 2016 (see case study).
Links:
Real Madrid
http://www.thedreamvr.com/theapp.php
https://www.facebook.com/RealMadrid
https://www.youtube.com/user/realmadridcf
https://www.instagram.com/realmadrid/
https://twitter.com/realmadrid
Astosch
Microsoft:
