Anthony Ferraro was pulsing with excitement as he experienced a live sporting event in a thrilling new way: through his fingertips, using an innovative new device.
Ferraro is legally blind. He has attended live games at stadiums throughout his life, relying on his hearing, a radio broadcast, or friends and family to update him on the action. He’d enjoyed the tailgating, the food and the socializing, but felt-overstimulated inside a loud, crowded stadium. Games were often hard to follow and he’d eventually check out.
But now Ferraro is one of the first to try a new tablet-sized device that helps those with blindness or low vision enjoy live sports in real time through their sense of touch. It’s starting to arrive at select stadiums in North America.
Created by Seattle-based company OneCourt, the rectangular laptop tactile device translates gameplay data into intuitive vibrations on the haptic display. So with hands placed on the surface, a visually impaired fan can follow the game action in real-time.
The device has tactile markings of the sport surface – like the lines of a basketball court or a baseball field. It’s WiFi and 5G enabled, and it uses the positional data that’s already being tracked by the leagues via computer cameras inside the stadiums during their games. As the ball moves, a fan feels vibrations beneath their fingers that convey the location, and unique pulses for scoring plays, like an intense throb over the hoop when a dunk happens. The user can also plug in headphones to hear audio updates.
A video of Ferraro excitedly using the device at a recent Portland Trail Blazers basketball game went viral. He is a musician as well as a para sport athlete who competes in judo and skateboarding and has some three million followers on social media. His video had more than four million views across his Instagram and TikTok channels and some 3,000 comments.
“I’ve found joy in doing sports, but I never thought I would enjoy being at a live game like that,” Ferraro told The Globe and Mail.
The video shows Ferraro feeling the game action through his hands, pushing a button to get quick audio status updates on the score and time left in the game, cheering in real time along with the crowd around him.
“I’ve never been able to enjoy a basketball game before. It’s usually just so loud – like you’re at a club, but you have no idea what’s going on,” Ferraro said. “So it was great to be involved in the excitement this time and not just guessing at what’s happening. I knew when to cheer. I didn’t even realize how fast the game moved until I experienced this.”
Ferraro’s videos on social media are popular, as he’s exuberant and optimistic while demonstrating how he navigates life while blind. The 29-year-old is training to compete for the U.S. in judo at the 2028 Los Angeles Paralympics. When he was in high school, there was a documentary made about his life as a blind wrestler. He doesn’t always like new tech that claims to make life easier or better for visually impaired people. But he likes the OneCourt device.
“I love live events. It’s still fun, if I could have something that keeps me in it, so I know what’s going on,” said Ferraro. “There’s no reason the whole MLB, NFL and NBA should not adapt this device.”
OneCourt’s devices are in only a few stadiums so far, but the company is busy working on partnerships with more teams and leagues to make it more widely available.
This season, the Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association became the first pro sports franchise to make OneCourt’s devices available for blind and low vision fans during their home games at Moda Center, free, and on a first-come-first serve basis. The Sacramento Kings now have them available at Golden 1 Center, as do the Phoenix Suns/Phoenix Mercury at the PHX arena, with some other NBA teams soon to follow.
Rollouts take time, as the device is first tested in different sports and venues. OneCourt says a handful of Major League Baseball teams in the U.S. are set to debut the devices at their home games in the upcoming season.
The company is hopeful the devices could be available in some NFL stadiums next season, following some testing in that league with the football prototype. They now also have a prototype for soccer. OneCourt couldn’t predict which sport – or stadium – might be the first to offer it in Canada.
The idea for the OneCourt device came to co-founder Jerred Mace back in September, 2021, during his junior year studying industrial design at The University of Washington. Mace saw a video of a deaf, blind man sitting at a soccer match with a sighted woman who was simultaneously moving his hands across a tactile game board to convey the movement happening on the field.
Mace wanted to scale that experience using technology. He soon formed a team of co-founders, drawing from engineering, design and entrepreneurial departments at the university. The idea inspired him on a personal level too, because he had his own vision challenges growing up and had benefitted from accommodations – eye surgeries, glasses, large font sizes on his computer screen.
“Everybody thinks of watching sports with your eyes or listening as kind of a secondary channel,” said Mace, also now the CEO. “But as a designer, seeing someone engage through another sense, through touch, was particularly compelling to me.”
As they developed the product, the OneCourt team has incorporated the input of people with blindness and partial sight. They provide insights, like what a two-point shot should feel like, versus a three-pointer, a home run or a strike out.
OneCourt has landed grants and investors. They worked with T-Mobile’s Tech Experience to test the device at MLB All-Star week. The company was chosen as one of five startups in this year’s cohort for the NBA Launchpad, a program that helps entrepreneurs incubate new tech that could add innovation to the league.
Mace said OneCourt hasn’t resolved pricing yet, but they hope a single device will be similar to the cost of a tablet or game console.
The company has big goals – to have a handful of their devices available for use in every sports stadium, and eventually for sale to visually impaired fans who want to use them at home.
They’ve spoken with families living with blindness who had never attended games before coming to try the device, or those who tried to attend in the past, but found it a terrible experience.
“We’re talking about impacting the experience for a small number of fans,” said Mace. “But impacting it by like 1,000 per cent.”