Last month, people attending a Dallas Cowboys game were shown more than just football. At the AT&T Stadium, the Cowboys’ home, fans with a 5g-enabled Samsung cell phone were treated to a range of groundbreaking features in augmented reality (ar).
On their way into the game, they held their phones up to watch 100-foot holograms of Cowboys players standing aloft on the stadium’s architecture. During play, their screens projected live stats above the pitch. At halftime, holograms of the players returned to the pitch to take on giant robots; the fans controlled the players through their phones.
This smorgasbord of zany ar experiences came courtesy of Nexus Studios (in partnership with AT&T and Samsung). The production company, which is based in L.A. and London, U.K., spent two years developing new systems and technologies to extend the possibilities of ar. It has now integrated these into a new location-based ar toolkit, Gilda.