Innovation, AI, and VR are changing every aspect of the world as we know it, sports not being an exception. Robot soccer or drone racing are just some of the sports rising in popularity worldwide.
For example, a sport called Speedgate is played by humans like any traditional sport, but AI designed the game. A team of scientists trained a neural network to analyze almost 400 sports and develop a new one.
While most results were disregarded for being too dangerous or simply hilarious, Speedgate was there to stay. Being a combination of rugby, football, and croquet, it’s slowly developing into a serious university league across the US.
Segway polo is yet another tech twist on a traditional sport. As the name suggests, it’s just like regular polo, except that players move around on Segways. It’s had steady growth over the previous decade, with the traditional world championships being held since 2006.
Unlike these two, RoboCup is a competition where no humans are allowed in. It’s a game of soccer, but fully autonomous robots play it. It all began as a fun scientific project, but today there are over 300 official teams — enthusiasts hope that a team of robots will be able to win a soccer game against a fully-human team in 2050.
Drone Racing League is probably the largest of tech sports. It was launched officially six years ago and now gathers a community of almost 75 million fans and participants worldwide.
These high-tech sports are nowhere close to becoming a competition to e-sports. On the contrary, however, they could become even more popular because they seem to be a perfect mix of modern technologies and traditional sports people are used to.
