You could play against Maria Sharapova at the U.S. Open, thanks to this amazing VR experience

By Andy Boxall August 25, 2015

YOU VS. SHARAPOVA: GROUNDBREAKING VIRTUAL REALITY EXPERIENCE PITS FANS VS. TENNIS ICON AT US OPEN!

Ever wondered how it would be to return the tennis serve of a champion? If you’re headed to the U.S. Open later this month, you may have the chance to find out — without having to set foot on the court itself, or risk embarrassing yourself in front of the crowd when you don’t even see the ball coming.

It’s all thanks to the wonder of virtual reality. HTC has teamed up with American Express to provide a four-minute VR tennis session, during which you’ll trade shots and attempt to return the 100mph serve from a VR version of tennis superstar Maria Sharapova. It’s not just a visual digital recreation either. According to Sharapova herself, speaking in a video introducing the experience, the game will be “pretty close to real life.”

The mixture of a CGI athlete blended with live action footage inside a VR environment is a world first, and an exciting demonstration of how VR may evolve to be used for entertainment, leisure, and even sports coaching in the future.

Sharapova wore a motion capture suit so her movements and play could captured using a full-body scan, and this data was used to create the CGI version used in the game. Players will wear HTC’s Vive VR headset, and Valve’s amazing Lighthouse tracking system will monitor all your movements. The Lighthouse system doesn’t use cameras to track your position, but a series of lights instead, and it’s very accurate.

Related: What it’s like to use the incredible HTC Vive

For the person playing against her, It’ll be the combination of the HTC Vive headset, Lighthouse, and a special handheld controller that makes the experience come alive. If you think your tennis game is strong enough to go up against Maria Sharapova (even a VR version), then the You vs. Sharapova VR experience will be ready to try throughout the U.S. Open, inside Amex’s Fan Experience enclosure at the event. The U.S. Open takes place between August 31 and September 13 in New York.

Editors' Recommendations

You can try Google Play Games on PC today as beta expands to the U.S.

Topics

Senior Mobile Writer

Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.