Zubr's interactive innovation scores big at Madison Square Garden

Designed to transport players into a near-future version of Madison Square Garden, where advanced holographic AI players are used as training partners for professional basketball players, the VR experience encourages players to take on various basketball training drills. Rather than focusing solely on traditional gameplay, the VR game emphasizes these skill-based training drills, allowing players to test and improve their shooting, blocking, and other fundamental basketball skills in a dynamic, gamified environment.

To ensure a unique and engaging user experience, the project was structured around virtual training drills rather than a full-fledged basketball match simulation. This decision was driven by several factors:

• Differentiation from traditional VR games: By focusing on training drills, Zubr’s VR experience offered a unique twist, with fresh and distinct gameplay set apart from generic shooting and scoring games.
• Short, modular experiences boost engagement: The game consists of multiple short, gamified training modules rather than a single extended session. This allows a greater number of users to engage with the experience and return to their favorite training drills.
• Encouraging varied user engagement: Players are challenged with different input styles and skill sets rather than repeating the same action, such as shooting three-pointers over and over again.

Beyond the user’s experience, this modular approach also ensures that the VR experience can easily be expanded in future, adding additional games, challenges and zones to offer a fresh and evolving gameplay experience.

Greeted by a gleaming basketball court lobby, users can peer around their surroundings in VR to take in the futuristic Madison Square Gardens, complete with holographic advertisements hanging overhead – advertising drinks, snacks, combo meals and more. Users can experience three different types of basketball drill games: shooting, passing, and defending. Drawing on the AI holographic player futuristic storytelling, players go head to head with a ‘ghost’ AI holograph All Star player, encouraged to put their best foot forward to beat the pro at each drill. The VR experience also projects a TV Sports channel-style Action Replay clip onto the accompanying screen, so players can savour their basketball victories.

Players can also compete against their friends and colleagues with the tournament leaderboard. After completing all three drill games, the leaderboard combines each player’s scores to give a total, which you can see up against the AI All Star’s final score – players can compete to see if they can beat the AI All Star’s score – or if they can out do their friends – which adds another competitive edge to these ball games.

In order to create a true-to-life courtside atmosphere, our 3D artists also modelled a thriving crowd, utilising bustling audio from Motion Array and vibrant multi-coloured visuals. Instead of using skeletal animation or blend shapes, our 3D artists employed Vertex Animation Textures (VAT), a technique that pre-bakes animation data from 3D software into a texture.

This method is especially useful for real-time VR applications such as the New York Knicks VR Experience, where performance is critical. By offloading animation calculations to the GPU, VAT significantly reduces CPU overhead, allowing for large numbers of animated objects without heavy processing costs. This method was implemented using a custom Unity shader with a texture lookup for vertex displacement, usually in the vertex shader stage. Essentially, adjusting the UV coordinates and time-based parameters means that smooth animations can be achieved whilst keeping rendering efficient and highly optimised.

The Infosys New York Knicks VR project represents a cutting-edge fusion of sports and technology, bringing an innovative and futuristic gaming experience to Madison Square Garden. By focusing on skill-based drills, the game provides a fresh and interactive approach to basketball training. With a scalable, modular design, this VR experience is poised for continuous growth, ensuring lasting engagement for Infosys clients and sports enthusiasts alike.

Moreover, the success of this basketball VR experience serves as a foundation for similar ventures. Whether it’s ice hockey with the NY Rangers, football for Manchester United, or Golf for Scottie Scheffler, there’s an entertaining application for VR to match every sport out there.