Formula 1 is working on a new augmented reality dashboard that will “make everybody a race engineer” when wearing headsets such as Apple’s Vision Pro.
Speaking ahead of this weekend’s British Grand Prix, Rob Smedley—the former Ferrari race engineer and now an F1 consultant—told me in a video interview that the sport is looking at new ways to engage the younger generation of fans that have flooded to F1 in recent years on the back of Netflix’s Drive to Survive series.
Smedley is part of the team that has delivered F1 Insights powered by AWS, a series of innovations that rely on cloud computing to deliver real-time data such as predicted pit-stop strategies or forecasts of forthcoming track battles, which are relayed live by race broadcasters.
Soon, Smedley believes that viewers wearing augmented reality headsets will be able to choose which data and video feeds they want to see, creating a virtual dashboard similar to that used by team race engineers.
Talking of Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro headset, Smedley described it as “really cool technology because you’re still in the room with everybody, but you’ve got this 4K screen in front of you. That, for me, is the future of sports watching.”
F1 and AWS are currently working on what Smedley described as “the second screen”, where a user-configurable dashboard of data is presented to viewers. That will intially be delivered via tablet devices that users can access alongside live race feeds, but Smedley said the project could eventually find its way into AR headsets such as Apple’s Vision Pro.
“You can imagine that working in augmented reality really well,” he said. “I’m watching Max Verstappen, but I want to flick that across, and I want to see how fast Lewis [Hamilton] is catching him. How do Max and Checo [Sergio Pérez] compare?Let’s have a look at their speed-trace comparison over the last few laps, compare the last few laps in terms of average lap time.
“That is super powerful,” Smedley added. “You then make everybody a race engineer, you make everybody like a team coach. It’s super technology.”
Not Spilling Race Secrets
By capturing all this real-time data on race performance, Smedley’s team has access to a lot of sensitive information that could potentially hand teams a competitive advantage if broadcast. How does F1 balance the tension between feeding insightful data to viewers and upsetting highly competitive team bosses?
“Each team has this huge volume of data and then Formula 1 gets to take, say, ten channels [of that data],” said Smedley. “We take those channels, we put them into the cloud, and then we spin up all sorts of analytics and algorithms and simulations on them to create more and more channels. So we effectively end up with a synthesized version of what the teams are getting off their cars.”
“If we were that way inclined, we could obviously start to show some very sensitive information on the live feed, [but] we realise we have a duty of care because we’re live broadcasting this data some of the time in order to engage the fans and give them a more immersive experience.”
Smedley said that a team of people, including experienced former race engineers such as himself, make a judgement on what data to present to avoid spilling secrets or giving teams an unfair advantage. “You have to walk the line of the sensitivity of the data that the teams have, because obviously the teams have their own data, but they don’t have any of the other teams’ data. So if we start to give them a competitive advantage, then it becomes really unfair. And it’s absolutely not the point of us doing this.”
Tech For The Netflix Generation
Part of the reason why F1 is working with AWS to develop new ways of feeding data to viewers is because it needs to engage the new generation of fans that have come to the sport.
“There’s been a massive influx of new fans,” said Smedley. “It’s the fastest growing sport from a fanbase point of view in the world, by far. We’ve got the fastest growing demographic of female fans, and our average [fan] age is plummeting.”
“A lot of new fans have come into this from left-field activations like Netflix and Drive to Survive. Who’d have thought that that would have had such a huge impact on an already global sport, especially Americans?”
“I think that we have a real duty as a sport to try and understand those fans, and that’s a project that we are just at the advent of trying to map out with AWS—using technology to try and understand this new demographic of fans and what they actually want, because once we know what they want then I think it’s a much more simple step to build the technology and deliver Formula 1 that they can enjoy.”
Crucially, that means finding ways to retain fans who don’t necessarily want to sit through entire races. “We’re probably going to end up with a minority of fans that watch Formula 1 on a Sunday afternoon for two hours,” said Smedley, “ especially with our fan base, which is getting younger and younger. Those guys are just not going to consume Formula 1 like that.”
“The more we can build out all of these data projects and insights projects, the better the chance we have of engaging and immersing the fans in the sport,” he said, adding that his team was focused on “keeping up with technology, as well as changing the sport to suit our fans.”
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