The founders of OneCourt, Field of Vision and Touch2See—based in Seattle, Dublin, and Toulouse respectively—weren’t all inspired by exactly the same clip, but the videos they did see were all variations on the same basic theme: a blind person having their hands guided by a companion across a facsimile of a soccer pitch in order to better understand what was happening in a live game. Instead of quickly becoming yesterday’s news like most others, those videos gave the founders the same idea: to create a device that would change how visually impaired people watch sport forever. All three companies are examples of what OneCourt’s CEO Jerred Mace calls “tactile broadcasters.” And while each of the devices differ in subtle ways, they all aim to do the same thing—convert the on-field action into movement that the user can feel with their fingers. “You can't have hundreds of people doing that one-for-one,” says Touch2See’s sales director John Brimacombe. “So we thought: how can we scale this up and make it more affordable, more accessible, and more pertinent to the modern world?” In recent years there has been a revolution in the world of sport. Professional clubs, in search of marginal gains that can mean the difference between success and failure, started to recruit companies such as Opta Stats and Catapult Sports to collect performance data on their behalf. It’s that data that is being used to power devices like those being developed by Touch2See and OneCourt. Field of Vision took a slightly different approach, developing its own low-latency cameras that process all the data locally before sending it to the device. But the end result is the same: as the real ball travels around the pitch, a physical representation of it moves across the surface of the device, allowing the user to follow the play in real time. To the unsuspecting observer it looks a little like a sports-themed Ouija board, but there’s nothing sinister about it. “Knowing what's happening as it's happening, and being able to celebrate with everybody else—that’s the magic of it,” says Mace. Good Vibes Only The position of the ball on the pitch is just one aspect of a game of soccer, rugby or basketball, so all three devices also have supplementary ways of communicating match events to the user. Both Touch2See and Field of Vision use vibration-based feedback systems that coincide with different actions, a bit like the force feedback you get from a PlayStation or Xbox controller. Field of Vision’s device is divided into two parts – one for the home team and the other for the visitors – with the bottom section emitting a deep rumble, while the top panel vibrates at a higher frequency. Co-founder Omar Salem calls it a “language of vibrations,” with passes indicated by short buzzes from the relevant section, longer ones signaling a change in possession, and more persistent vibrations to indicate when a goal or try is scored. For sports like rugby or Australian rules football there are also further physical indicators for scrums and marks (a catch that earns the player a free kick). OneCourt decided on a different method early in development. Rather than having a mechanism similar to a 3D printer inside, which drags the magnetic “ball” across the surface on top, OneCourt’s hardware uses a pixel-based system that’s a bit like animated braille from beneath. “Our technology co-opts the basic principles of animation that have been proven in our visually dominant world,” explains Mace, using Christmas lights that blink in succession to create the illusion of movement as an example. “But instead of pixels that you see, these are pixels that you feel.” That also changes what OneCourt can do with the top panel of its device. All three companies have interchangeable plates for different sports, with grooves marked in them to show the markings of the playing area at hand, but OneCourt’s approach means it can show multiple “views" of a game simultaneously. That comes in particularly useful for baseball, with one half of the interface showing where the ball is pitched relative to the batter, and the other displaying a top-down view of the diamond and the positions of the runners. For a soccer game, this “split-screen” mode can also be used to provide more contextual detail when a goal is scored. “With touch you can't show everything at the same time,” says Mace. “With visual sense, we see the big picture first and then we pick out details, whereas with touch you're actually starting with the details and then building a bigger picture.” Part of that bigger picture is constructed using audio. All three of these devices can accept commentary feeds for connected headphones, but if there aren’t any available or they’re not in real time and would lag behind the tactile element, OneCourt has a text-to-speech system called "audio bites” that can turn events labelled within the ball-tracking data into a simple audio description. Touch2See is also currently working on something similar that differentiates between the actions of the two teams by using distinctly different voices. Home and Away Anybody who has tried to send a text or check social media inside a busy stadium will understand how difficult that can be when 50,000 people are trying to post Instagram stories at the same time: the networks get overloaded. These company’s devices aren’t magically immune to such problems, but all three are as well-prepared as possible connectivity-wise. OneCourt and Field of View favour Wi-Fi but have the capability to use 5G as well, while Touch2See prioritizes 5G because of the mobility that it offers, but can fall back on Wi-Fi or even ethernet if necessary. The method used will vary from stadium to stadium. A solid connection is essential when it comes to reducing latency, which is usually just an annoyance but here could completely ruin the experience. Even a slight delay meaning that the movement on the device lags a second or so behind the action would render the whole thing pointless, as the reaction of the crowd would give away that something significant had just occurred. That is one of the main reasons Field of View decided to develop its own cameras, because it found the existing data being collected at the stadiums wasn’t always available in real time. It’s theoretically possible for the Field of Vision device to use third-party data as long as the delay is no more than half a second, but it’s yet to be tested without Field of Vision’s own cameras. All three companies also have plans for their devices to be used somewhere that connectivity shouldn’t be an issue: in people’s homes. After all, that’s where technology like this is likely to be most widely used, with far more fans watching sport from the comfort of their sofas than in person. Mace says OneCourt intends to build its home version of the product over the next six months, and while some hurdles are removed outside the stadium it does introduce some new ones: the tracking data will need to be licensed for use elsewhere, syncing with the broadcast will present a challenge to overcome, and they will need to work out how to offer technical support. Full Circle For now, all three companies are focused on making their devices available in as many stadiums and arenas as possible. Touch2See’s most high-profile uses have been at last year’s Olympics and at Ligue 1 soccer matches in France; OneCourt is now available at all Portland Trail Blazers and Sacramento Kings home games in the NBA; and Field of Vision has a deal in place with Marvel Stadium in Melbourne for its AFL games, plus its device is now permanently installed at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium. Irish rugby fan Martin Gordon, who lost his sight completely over two decades ago, used Field of Vision’s product for the first time when he attended the Six Nations clash between Ireland and England earlier this year. “They gave me a demonstration but within 10 or 15 minutes of using it you know the difference between the vibrations,” he says. Gordon used to play rugby when he was at school, so even just with audio commentary he has a fairly good idea of what’s happening on the pitch in front of him, but he says using Field of Vision makes following the game much more exciting. “For somebody like me who has been on a rugby pitch and knows exactly what one looks like, when I listen to commentary I can picture where the play is, but being able to feel it exactly is incredible. Now somebody who's never even seen a rugby pitch can really get a feel for the game, if you’ll excuse the pun.” In a situation that feels like things have gone full circle, there are now videos going viral of visually impaired fans using these devices at games. In February, TikTok user Anthony Ferraro, who was born with a degenerative eye condition called Leber Congenital Amaurosis, shared a video of himself using OneCourt at a Portland Trail Blazers game. Afterwards he described it as “life-changing.” Back in December 2024, Sardinian soccer team Caligiari posted a video on Instagram of Daniele Cassioli, a paralympic water-skier who has been blind since birth, using a Touch2See device during a trial at one of the club’s games. Brimacombe says the feedback has been “really emotional,” with some users even brought to tears by the experience, and describes sitting with a fan using a Touch2See device as he raged in unison with the rest of the crowd at a refereeing decision. Because isn’t that what sport is all about? Gordon is similarly effusive about the impact this kind of technology will have on his enjoyment of the game as a blind spectator. “It completely adds to my experience as a supporter,” he says, “and gives back something huge that was lost for me 23 years ago.”