“We understand that VR is new, and the market is still being defined,” adds Jones. The underlying technology is already in use by a half-dozen NFL teams in training, so there’s an inherent realism to the game play, but Jones says they tried to gamify the experience somewhat for consumers. Hawkins says “there’s no blueprint” for a VR football game, and the creators are eager to see where in Pro Era users gravitate. There are a variety of game options: two-minute drill, season mode, mini games, practices and even a multiplayer version in which you can play virtual catch with a disparate friend. The Next Gen Stats player tracking data has informed the players’ abilities and behaviors by training the artificial intelligence engine. Pro Era seeks to replicate the experience and vantage point of a quarterback, from calling plays to checking a wrist band for an audible and throwing over and between one’s offensive linemen. An introduction was made, and StatusPro would soon be born. “Everything that I've done off the field, from day one, has been to get to this point,” says Hawkins.īy coincidence, Hawkins was connected to this SportTechie reporter on the same August 2017 day a story ran on Mixed River, an extended reality training simulation technology where Jones was VP of sports. Hawkins admits now that he has been driven toward this goal for years, earning a master’s degree from Columbia, speaking at the MIT Sloan conference and taking on extensive profile-raising on-air gigs with ESPN, Amazon, NFL Network, Uninterrupted and Roku. The development journey of this game was at times slow-its first demo was ready in 2018-but carefully considered. And then the end game, we want to make it fun.” “We want to make sure that the experience with everything around the game is always tracking towards authentic-what you hear, what you see, what your optionality is and how you digest everything. You get to feel what it's like running out of the NFL tunnel, and that is a moment that I remember specifically being an ‘aha’ moment,” Hawkins says, StatusPro’s chief business officer who co-founded the company with CEO Troy Jones, a former Division I quarterback. “How do we take what we've done in our athletic careers and extract all the fun parts? Like running out of a tunnel. Pro Era, which retails for $29.99, is not only the league’s first licensed VR football game but also the first major gaming title to be developed by athletes. Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, the unanimous 2019 NFL MVP, adorns the cover. That was the seed of StatusPro and its new virtual reality game, Pro Era, that launches today in partnership with the NFL and NFLPA and with a $5.2 million seed round and strategic investments from the likes of LeBron James, Drake and Naomi Osaka. Hawkins further iterated on how this could manifest in sports and began taking meetings with AR and VR companies. The idea evolved with the younger Hawkins ruminating on the prospect of a hologram-or some other augmented or virtual representation-delivering the mentorship and feedback. His entrepreneurial younger brother, Andrew, himself an NFL veteran, was inspired to help and sought to build an app that would facilitate connections between those with experience in a field “with somebody who would value it, which is typically people who want to be in their shoes,” Andrew Hawkins says. Courtesy of StatusProĪrtrell Hawkins played nine years in the NFL, yet when he wanted to go into coaching, he was told he didn’t have enough experience. Pro Era, the first major gaming title to be developed by athletes, is designed to replicate the authentic gameplay action in virtual reality.
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