Superhuman Sports: The Japanese Society Turning Athletics into a Video Game

Imagine if you could use augmented reality to turn football into a real-life video game. Or how about racing against another person in an exoskeleton? Such visions for the future of sport aren't just the stuff of fiction, they're actually some of the ideas that Japan's "Superhuman Sports Society" are toying with right now.

The Superhuman Sports Society, or S3, which launched earlier this month, might sound like another oddball Japanese export. But the group made up of researchers, game devs, artists, athletes, and designers has concrete plans to pioneer new forms of sport for what it dubs an "augmented human." They basically want to use wearable technologies to turn your sporting experience into an IT-powered show.

In a video released by S3, you can see everything from virtual reality headset-clad swimmers to students "racing" each other in cumbersome exoskeletons.

"Our human bodies are limited because they are made of bone and muscle, which are not impact-resistant," Takuya Nojima, an S3 board member and associate professor at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, told me over Skype. "Our goal is, therefore, to enhance human abilities through exoskeletons, or by giving them supervision or super hearing by using wearable and virtual reality technologies."

S3 has two main aims: Firstly, the group wants to enhance our mortal strengths and abilities with tech. Secondly, it wants to level the playing field so that the young, old, and disabled can compete together.

It's aiming to launch its inaugural festival in Tokyo in October 2015, and hold an international tournament in 2020 at the same time as Japan's Tokyo Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

As the group has just launched, Nojima said that everything is still a work-in-progress. However, what's particularly exciting is the scope to invent new games to suit emerging technologies. Take, for example, a sport that they compare to Quidditch in Harry Potter, which sees wizard kids whizzing around on broomsticks and chasing after a flying ball.

To replicate the illusion of flying with virtual reality, S3's executive director Kota Minamizawa came up with the "telexistence drone." This, explained Nojima, allows the VR headset wearer "to feel as if he is becoming the flying drone." A camera on the drone feeds back images to the drone controller's VR headset in real-time, giving them a "drone's eye" perspective on their environment.

In other words, following on in the footsteps of researchers who've proven that you can feel teleported into another body through VR, the researchers make you feel like you've been teleported onto a flying device. What's cool here is that anyone, regardless of fitness level or physical handicap, could play this game as long as they've got access to the tech.

For the folks over at S3, the Olympic Games in 2020 are a reason to think big. "As we will host the Olympic Games in 2020, we need to develop an organisation that fuses traditional sports with new technologies," said Nojima. "Actually, I'm not a very good sports player so I'd like to create a sport that even I can enjoy."

Wearable tech will no doubt enhance our sporting experiences. But I'm left wondering if the future of IT-powered sports will change the rules of the game in other ways too. How democratic could this be in the long run? Might it be that the team with the strongest tech will just emerge the winner in any tournament or competition?

For the moment, S3 envisions that its form of sport will be picked up by tech enthusiasts across the world, and be like a more physically-engaging and interactive form of esports, which see players engage solely in a virtual context.

And regardless of whether we'll be able to join in the game or not, it's still cool to think that there might soon be a Quidditch or Dragon Ball-inspired sports experience coming to a playing field near you.

Cool Japan is a column about the quirky and serious happenings in the Japanese scientific, technological and cultural realms. It covers the unknown, the mainstream, and the otherwise interesting developments in Japan.