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Tech

Is Kobe Bryant's Projection-Augmented Court the Future of Basketball?

Or at least of basketball training ...
Image: Nike

It's easy to imagine really good basketball players having something like an augmented-reality court continuously updating just within their headspace. There's so much visual chaos in a game—or what might seem to an outsider to be visual chaos.

For someone with the right kind of intelligence and quickness, it must just appear like a frenetic map-blur of best routes, for the player or the ball, to get from here to there with the least amount of resistance and, thus, achieve the lowest probability of losing the ball or missing the shot.

Now, that headspace has a real-world translation of sorts, thanks to Kobe Bryant and China's House of Mamba state-of-the-art training center. The Creators Project explains:

Visualized with colored X's, circles, and boundary zones, the court has the ability to guide players along moves and plays curated by Bryant himself. Trainess got to play ball with Bryant, and in their peripherals, a motion tracking device, live-catalogued their performance stats. Beyond just an aesthetically-enhanced experience, this allowed players a full immersion into the strategies and nuances of Kobe's legendary game.

A cool idea, but Kobe Bryant could literally possess my body and I'd still have a hard time making a layup on an empty court. Perhaps your own skills are not entirely beyond hope.