For fans with blindness and low vision, the tactile sports broadcast could be a game changer. Its premise is simple: instead of watching a match with your eyes, you're feeling it through your hands. Around the world, a handful of companies have found ways to enable this technology, including US start-up OneCourt, whose 'haptic display' is a rectangular, tablet sized device. Users place their hands on its surface, through which real-time, sport-specific information is conveyed through a collection of vibrating motors. In tennis and basketball, you're 'feeling' the ball as it travels from one side of the court to the other, while in baseball, your left hand is tracking the play as the batter rounds the bases and your right is viewing a "strike zone" that conveys information about each ball pitched. Although the technology is still in its infancy, this season it has made its courtside debut at the home games of three NBA teams at no additional cost to fans. Closer to home, Field of Vision became the first company to trial similar technology in Australia, with some fans at Docklands offered the opportunity to track AFL games through haptics. Unlike the OneCourt technology, where specific areas of the device vibrate in turn, Field of Vision conveys its haptic information through a magnetic ring. That ring travels across a handheld, model field, tracing the movement of the ball and signalling specific, game-state vibrations. The audio component of sports broadcasting is changing as well, with the development of designed spatialised soundscapes helping to convey what is often missed by commentators. For fans with a vision impairment, such technology has the potential to revolutionise the way sport is consumed. But for the wider population, does the future of sports entertainment lay beyond sight? Haptic technology won't replace audio, but augment it Haptic technology is designed to work alongside either a radio broadcast or audio descriptive commentary (ADC). ADC is offered at an increasing number of stadiums across the world and allows for fans with blindness and low vision to more closely follow a game by painting a detailed verbal image of what's happening on field. According to OneCourt CEO Jerred Mace, haptic technology and ADC work well in tandem because audio and touch are best suited to conveying different kinds of information. "We're never going to communicate player names through haptics. It's just not what touch is good at," Mace told ABC Sport. "And in the same way, it's hard to communicate spatial information through audio, especially in sports, because as soon as you describe the position of a tennis ball, it has already changed." Each OneCourt device features headphone connectivity through which fans can listen along to an audio broadcast as they feel the game through their hands. For some environments in which ADC or radio commentary isn't available, OneCourt offers users a short-form radio broadcast that is generated, in real time, from the same information used for its haptics. This allows for fans, especially those with vision impairments, to have more agency over their experiences taking in sport. "Some low-vision users lean into the tactile and some don't," Mace said. "Some are focused on magnification … [and] we have had many fans that say 'hey, I just want the audio'." How spatial audio can make sound more useful The audio components of traditional sports broadcasting, particularly on television, go largely unquestioned. Commentary often adds colour and emotion to proceedings and, at its best, is both informative and interesting. But Tim Devine, executive creative director of augmented audio company Action Audio, says the sonic potential of sport remains mostly untapped. "If you think about the sound in a Marvel film or a Batman film, it's intense and very intricate and expressive," Devine told ABC Sport. "And what happens in sports is maybe not as intense, but it's still not represented as well as it could be from an audio perspective." Action Audio works with blind and low-vision sports fans to determine what information is missing from sports broadcasts. That missing information is then translated into a spatial soundscape, with in-game actions being represented by designed sound effects. The service made its courtside debut at a major tennis tournament two years ago, where users wore a single mono earpiece. During this trial, the movement of the ball was represented by a synthetic 'rattle' sound reminiscent of the audible ball used in blind tennis. The force with which the ball was hit, its closeness to the line and the shot type were all also sonified. In the coming months, Action Audio will trial its service with one of the world's major basketball leagues, with a sonic language drastically different to the one designed for tennis. During Action Audio's research into basketball commentary, Devine found there was often a rather conspicuous absentee. "What came out, was the ball is missing," Devine said. "There are so many stars in basketball, but the ball is really the focus. "Which seems obvious, but it's also not, as the commentators don't really surface it as much as they could." So, the basketball soundscape largely centres around the ball's movement — when it bounces, when it is passed and its velocity. There are also different sounds used for when one-, two- and three-point shots are taken, as well as a success sound for a score and a separate signal for a slam dunk. From the stadium to the living room The development of augmented soundscapes and haptic broadcasting has been made possible by the amount of data now collected by major sports leagues. "Why didn't this happen five years ago? I think the real answer to that, in my opinion, is the data infrastructure," Mace said. "Right now, leagues and teams, they're collecting so much data. "They know exactly where the ball is, where the players are, and I think people underestimate how precise it is and also how fast it is." This means that courtside at NBA games, OneCourt devices experience latencies of less than half a second. Although the service is only currently available at a select few sporting venues in North America, Mace says the product's future is as much in the home as it is in the stadium. He is hopeful the technology will be available in-home as early as 2026 and will initially cost "around the same price as a cell phone". Action Audio is also making tentative steps towards the living room. For both companies, perhaps the biggest challenge for making the leap into homes is that of broadcasting rights and how they will be sold. It's uncharted territory; never before have the tactile or spatial audio rights to a sports league been sold. But Mace says it's a possibility leagues have been more than happy to consider. "The leagues love it, because they have sold their visual rights, they have sold their audio rights, and now here we are telling them 'hey, here's a totally new area of broadcasting'," Mace said. "They're really excited about it, and we'll definitely make it happen." The immediacy of sporting experience In all aspects of life, people with vision impairments are accustomed to reacting after the fact. In a sporting context, that means being told what type of shot a batter has played in cricket, or knowing a footballer has scored a goal through the roar of the crowd. Both Mace and Devine say they were very prepared for their products to fail, or to not be of use to fans with blindness and low vision. But for both technologies, the reliable provision of immediate sporting experience has already proved revolutionary for vision impaired fans and, for the most part, the most basic information has made all the difference. "One of the bits of feedback that we've got was that the really simple stuff we're providing — how close the ball is to the line, what shot type it is, who hit the ball — enabled people to feel like they knew what had happened," Devine said. "So they felt really wrapped up in all the emotions like everybody else."