The inevitability of Magic Quidditch: when Mixed Reality meets muggle sports
The inevitability of Magic Quidditch: when Mixed Reality meets muggle sports
Exploring the convergence of spatial computing technologies and how the challenges left to bring Magic Quidditch into existence
When 11-years-old me received for Christmas my first Harry Potter book — and in spite of my utter lack of interest for team sports — it didn’t take long before I started drawing up ideas for a Quidditch simulator, with a 360° screen, blue/red glasses and a mechanical arm to slam a ball in your face. After concluding that I didn’t have the skills nor the funding to start such an endeavour I let the project on my shelves and moved on forever… or so did I think?
“Recently” — 2016, be the judge of that — I was jogging around the Parc de Vincenne in Paris and to my surprise was seeing multiple teams practicing a sport that didn’t quite look like anything I knew and even less that I would imagine gathering crowds. Turns out that there is a real-life muggle quidditch (apparently quadball now, copyright yay) that has rules and that can physically being played. And that you don’t win just by catching the Golden Snitch apparently, sorry Harry.
Which leaves us on one hand with a sport that is surprisingly well-structured — with a world cup, leagues in every country and more than 10,000 players if you believe the numbers — and on the other hand with the Mixed Rea… Spatial Computing finally emerging to a usable point. Is it time to bring a little bit of magic to this world?
The map
For those who don’t know Wardley Maps, it is an analysis framework based on military strategy and applied to business. There is a long boring book of 700 pages (or a 15h-long audiobook if you prefer) to explain it in details with hard, scientifically-studied mechanics and rules. There are simpler resources to get into it, which I definitely recommend.
In essence, it allows you to place on a 2D map business concepts and to know how they are going to interact with each other. This allows you to predict what is going to happen and when it’s going to happen with much more precision than reading tea leaves or hiring consultants.
Let’s go back to our current topic. Here is the map of Magic Quidditch, if you want to watch it from a stadium near you.
The map allows to clearly see dependencies in space and one of its most practical properties is to help you decide whether you build, buy or outsource something. By looking at the connected and close-up sections of this map, we can decide to group different parts and how we can approach them.
Make Yourself — As a magic provider, this is what you will want to develop yourself
Partner Up — A section of utmost importance in your value chain but that you can’t possibly make from the ground up yourself
Leave it to Apple — Apple and other big actors are already pushing this section hard enough so you don’t need to worry about it
Muggle Quidditch — There is already a vast community of quadballers, players and spectators. While it’s proving interesd, it’s also going to be a challenge to onboard them
So how do we get started?
Leave it to Apple
What has been abundantly obvious to me since swarms of people were chasing Pikachus in all the streets over the world during the summer of 2016 is that reality is about to become a much more flexible concept. If bars were paying to lure Pokémons — and the trainers that sought them — how are those creatures not real? It was involving real money with real people and real consequences.
There has since been a large number of devices and detours, from the Google Cardboard to the Metaverse madness going through by the Magic Leap and countless other attempts. All of them failed to produce a convincing experience until the Apple Vision Pro came around a few weeks ago. It’s just an increment on top of it all, but definitely crosses a threshold.
It is however lacking one thing. Niantic — the maker of Pokemon Go — understands that what makes reality real is that it can be shared between people. And while they released their framework Lightship which runs on several devices, it’s still not available on the Vision Pro. Which in turn is really focused on the hardware and not so much on its applications.
To summarize, while we’re not exactly there yet, the convergence is painfully close:
Digital worlds can be overlayed to the physical reality and shared between different people in real time
All the subtleties like eye tracking, mobile compute power, energy supply, etc are solved at an acceptable level today
Devices are increasingly able to merge physical and virtual, with different techniques and qualities
While we still need to see all of that in a single affordable device, one can project this to happen in a matter of years of not months. As a reminder the Apple 1 was released for $666.66, which is about the price of a Vision Pro adjusted for today’s dollar.
Knowing this, we know one thing for certain. This will enable a whole range of applications which were not previously possible and open a completely new industry. And when you know how much stadiums and entertainment parks cost, it’s not unthinkable to imagine them as the first clients for “Spatial Computers”.
Muggle Quidditch
In the Harry Potter lore, muggle means non-magic. Given that we are indeed forbidden the world of wizzards, thousands of people joined hands in nonetheless adapting Quidditch to our lowly muggle world. And as explained in introduction, you will find them training and competing in various locations all around the globe.
The fact that an entire generation — my generation — decided to simply ignore the limitations of the physical world because they would much rather live in a magic universe is simply incredible to me. There are a lot more of us nerds out there than I previously thought!
Which turns out to be a great news for any purveyor of magic — or the next best thing, Mixed Reality. And when magic becomes real, what better candidate than the most famous magical sport?
The existing base of leagues, players and public is an incredible starting point for such an endeavor. It’s not like if you pulled a new sport ex nihilo: we know that it exists, with the potential to be pushed much further.
The issue is that if you want to make Magic Quidditch you’ll need to be very careful how you approach this. The spark that ignited those players came from the Harry Potter lore but what feeds their fire today is the sport as it is. As such, an absolutely crucial aspect to Magic Quidditch will be to change how spectators perceive the sport without changing one bit how it is played today.
Beyond this if you were to pour a lot of money into a sport that is entirely amateur today it would probably become divisive for the community, create tensions that don’t exist today, progressively replace the profile of players, etc. I’m not an expert in sports but given the corrosive power of money you can expect something will get lost on the way. Does Quadball deserve such a frustrating makeover? The exercice is left to the reader, but what is for sure is that you will need to gain the adhesion of the community before anything else.
Partner up
Since we don’t want to change how the sport is played, how are we going to inject magic in it?
We’ve talked about the downside of money, but it also comes with a lot of upsides. Including in the present case, all professional sports have been saturated with analysis technologies which can tell you everything going on in the field in real-time. For example Hawk-Eye will give you stick figures of all the players, exact position of balls in relation to delimitations, etc. It could probably do all the referee’s job automatically.
So here’s a dillema. On one hand nobody has Quadball tracking, on the other hand those people are a few million dollars closer to it than you are. The most logical thing here would be to partner up. Pay them to do the Quadball version of their software and then simply use it.
Make it yourself
At this point we are outsourcing the magic, the public, the players and the tracking of them. So what is left for us to do?
The idea for a match is simple. You gather everyone in a stadium, you put the players on the grass and you let them play as they would usually play. Then a tracking system gets all their motions, translates it into 3D and the public sees digital avatar of players flying on their broomsticks over the field.
Two obvious components emerge from this:
The “tracking to magic mapping”. You’ll need to figure an engine that understands the game from what the tracking system reports and converts it into a scene with wizzards flying all over the stadium, in three dimensions (versus basically two in a Quadball game).
And of course the rendering of that scene. Which will have to run in the headsets directly so that everyone can see it from their own perspective.
Given the quality of render and actual gameplay of games like FIFA/PES and friends, while this certainly is going to require a lot of work, this seems to be an expensive but safe challenge.
There is however another item that requires attention, which is the connectivity. Indeed, streaming this to a stadium at full capacity is a technological challenge that is yet to be seen accomplished. So many clients would completely tear down a WiFi network and 5G deployments are actually identical to 4G in most cases. Theoretically speaking however, you could do it with either properly configured 5G — which remains to be seen outside a lab — or with a finely tuned WiFi and strictly multicast data streams.
In short, there is a certain amount of cash to burn in order to even reach the first decent demo — with pratical challenges such as the massive connectivity required — but this seems quite achievable.
Conclusion
Quidditch is a long-term dream of a whole generation, which manifests itself by the fact that people are actually playing it today. On the other hand, when you see that billions are being poured into Mixed Reality/Spatial Computers/etc, it is only a matter of time before technology becomes capable of magic.
As such, Magic Quidditch is inevitable. It is bound to happen and has the potential to be the first mixed electronicotraditional sport.
All the technology that you need to build it already exists, it’s mostly a matter of sticking all legos in the right order. Once you have it, all that is left is gather all the public into a stadium, stick a Spatial Computer in front of their eyes and let them enjoy the show.
That computer is not yet available in the quantity/price that would befit such an event but you can be sure that by the time you are done building your project this situation will have become absolutely acceptable.
And for as much this Reality is Mixed, so are my feelings about the upcoming era. We are about to go through the most incredible experiences that Humankind ever created — only bound by our own imagination. Yet few of it will be physical. What will this new reality cost to our civilization?