 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, we're talking about virtual reality tennis. My guest is Dr. Gregory Gettinger, the CEO and founder of VR Motion Learning. He's joining us from Vienna, Austria. Welcome, Gregory. Thank you for having me. So what is virtual reality tennis? Well, as you said, you play tennis in virtual reality. You play tennis in the metaverse. But what is really different here, compared to any kind of VR tennis game, is that we have really converted the ball physics from the real court into the virtual world. So you do all the authentic moves and technique as you would do on the real court in a metaverse. And that's a big, big difference. All right, let's show the teaser. Gregory, how did VR tennis come about? You know, when you play tennis on the real court, you do not really know if you're improving and how your strokes are doing. And you have to really book a court and go there. And if you want to play a tournament, you have to drive somewhere. So there was a real need to digitalize tennis and make it online. And that was basically the task we went through. But as again, I didn't want to have any kind of stupid engine just with the ball physics. I wanted to have the real thing. And that's why we made all the research and development to convert the real environment into the virtual environment. So what is your background in tennis and otherwise that has allowed you to do this? Well, I'm a really lousy tennis player. You know, I think I played 100 tournaments. And out of the 100 tournaments, I think I just won two. And that was the lowest grade you can get. So I had to do something with my tennis. I started very late. I played basketball before. So that's my experience with tennis. But I love to sport. It's a fantastic sport. And you can play it at any age at any level. So it's really fun. All right. So how does virtual reality tennis work? Well, quite easy. You just put on the headset. In our case, it's the Oculus Quest or HTC. And all you need is the Wi-Fi and off you go. You just download our application. It's one button you press. And basically you are already on a virtual tennis court. And off you go. You can play with a ball machine. You can play with anyone who's online. And you can play with yourself. So if you play with yourself, you shoot the ball over the net. And you get instantly on the other side. You have to shoot your own ball back. So that's a very fun game. So that's what's happening. And you just put on the headsets and off you go. All right. So why would someone play VR tennis rather than play on a court? Oh, there are many, many reasons. Many, many reasons. Well, there are two sides. The one is the entertainment factor. And the other one is the training aspect. So for the training aspect, if I want to improve my technique, my swings, my strokes, and I want to know what is my velocity of each stroke? What's the spin? What's the trajectory? I'm hitting the targets, all that stuff. We want to follow that up. It's a great training session. I have ball machines with all kind of exercises. So you can really train your technique in the living room, at home, wherever you are. That's the one side. But the other side is if you want to play your friends, and it's hard to go somewhere to a court, or your friends are in a different city, a different country, and you still want to play them and have fun with them, or if you want to have a tournament and you don't want to travel somewhere and still make some prize money, then virtual tennis is the solution. So I could be playing against you today, Gregory, and you're in Austria, and I'm in Hawaii. Yes. All you need is a headset, and then off we go. Yes. Absolutely. Let's pull up the training video. What is that show? Well, what you have seen is all the training exercises with the ball machine. So you can train your forehand, your backhand slice, and you have different kind of training exercises, depending on the level where you start with. So the very first exercise on the beginner level is that you have a standing ball which you just hit over the net, and then it gets faster and faster, and the exercises get more and more competitive and difficult. So it's basically everything you do with a ball machine also on the real court. You can do on a virtual court, but you have all the scores and leaderboards and rankings and all that stuff on top of it. So that's what you see here. I don't think I've played tennis since I was in high school. So if I started playing with this, would I be able to start from kind of a low level and then kind of improve by using this? Well, you know what? It's crazy. If you really start tennis with us, what we do is we compare, for example, your forehand stroke with an ideal forehand stroke. So we will give you hints how to improve your technique step by step. So we tell you on the forehand stroke, hit the ball a little bit earlier, follow through your arm over the shoulders, have your elbow up, all that stuff. So we bring you into the right technique. And the idea is that you learn such a fantastic technique that you can go the next day to the real court and play tennis like a professional. So one of my friend's daughter, she's a high school student and she's a very good tennis player. If she used this, could she kind of move up a level or improve? Yes, that's the idea. That's why we call ourselves motion learning. The idea is that you can improve your technique. But it's not only the technique, not only the stroke analysis. In tennis, you have a lot of technical training. You have tactical training. You have mental training and you have physical training. So for example, mental training, we can put you into the US Open final third set tie break, second serve. And the spectators are yelling at you and you still have to deliver your second serve just like in training. So you can do some kind of mental training, which you would never be able to do at the real court. Because if I play tennis in the real court, I have maybe two or three spectators. And that's a lot. Usually nobody watches me. And in a virtual life, you can do everything basically. And you can make up everything. Also on the tactical training, I could play Andre Agassi in the virtual court, exactly the same pattern he plays with his spin, with his velocity, with his strengths and weaknesses. So when I play him really on the next day, which I will never do anyway, but if I would play in the next day, I would be prepared and I would play much better than just starting to play with him. That's fantastic. OK, so a lot of athletes will visualize their game. And so this is more than visualization, right? I mean, you're actually doing the physical as well as the mental, correct? Correct, correct. And I always make that comparison. If you watch the US Open and you're laying on the couch and eating potato chips, the next day, you will be 4% to 5% better in tennis. And you will be motivated to go to the court. You want to go to the court and play tennis. Now with us, you improve not 4% to 5%. You improve 20% to 30%. And you are eager to play tennis and show it. So it's a real motivator out of the virtual world to go into the real world and back. So it's a hybrid solution. So you talked about playing Andre Agassi by virtually. Do you think that playing VR tennis helps people who are serious players overcome their anxiety so they won't choke when they actually play? Well, I just made this example with the mental training. How often can a professional really train being in the US Open in the final third set tie break, second serve? You don't have that many occasions where you can train that. And in virtual life, you can do that. But I have to tell you one thing. Our application is not actually for the professionals, not for the top three, top 100. We want to have something for all recreational players, for everyone who wants to play tennis, from the beginners and just having fun and learning the game. So we're not really focusing on the top 10, even though they can improve the tennis too. But I think they have other tasks than playing VR tennis. OK, so let's show the ball exchange video. That was a tricky ball. Beauty, beauty. There we go. That was a very tricky ball. Backhand, he's made it. Oh, you're always playing on my backhand. Yeah. All right, all right, now we're going to hit the backhand. Oh, no. There we go. Backhand cross. Did you see this backhand? Beauty, yeah. I'm getting better with my backhand now. Oh, what a nice shot. I'm not going to make the mistake. Intense rally. You're going to make the mistake. I'm not going to make the mistake. Oh, no. You're going to make it. You're going to make the mistake. Not me. Oh, no. They are one for service. Feeling pressure. That was a nice rally. Yeah. All right, Gregory, tell us about that video. Yeah, that was an interesting video because it was me, the old fat guy in the background, playing against the tennis coach in the Netherlands. So I was playing in Vienna, Austria, and Sam was playing out of Amsterdam. And Sam is a real good tennis player. He's a tennis coach. And you could see the difference between him and me. I made a little bit of a shortcut because in our tennis game, you can define the space in which you play. So I defined the space just one step right, one step left, to make it easy for me. But you also can define the space like, you know, four times four meters or even half a tennis court where you really have to run. Now, most of the people don't have that space in the living room. So that's why you have this flexibility. But in that video, I, you know, this was a Twitch video where, you know, you show how I'm playing life and Sam playing life on the same court, same virtual court. And it was fun because we had a, we really had a fun tie break on that evening. So that was the video. Great. Is there any way you could like handicap one player? No, we don't wanna interfere into that. So if somebody plays better than the other one, he plays better than the other one. It's like here on that video, Sam is a much better tennis player than me. We're not influencing that. So you have the real ball physics from the real court and it's the same thing as in the real court. So there's nothing you can make it better. The only way you could change around are two things. The one is I could make his space, you know, larger than mine. So he has to run and I just stand around and play. That would be very unfair, but that's something we could arrange or could agree. And the second thing is, you know, we have different kinds of surfaces. You kind of choose if you wanna play on clay, on grass, on hot court, the temperature, you know, if it's hot, if it's warm, if it's cold, what kind of hide you have because the ball physics are different and the tennis player would know very well the difference between hard court and grass and temperatures, all that stuff. So I could, you know, if I play, I choose my favorite surface, which is clay and temperature, all that stuff. So I'm used to that ball physics and to that environment. And the other one has to join me. So that's the only advantage that you can have if you're playing VR tennis. You know, we've seen it where you can practice with yourself and we've seen doubles, I mean singles. Can you play doubles in this? Theoretically, you could play doubles. We have not put it into place yet because of liability issues because with a headset, you're blind and you would not see the other one. And I'm a little bit afraid somebody would hit the racket on your head and we would have, you know, some kind of problems there. So, so far we just focused on singles. You know, that makes a lot of sense. Now, is this a sport that would be something you could view for entertainment? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So when we play, anyone can watch from any kind of angle. So it's, you can even, you know, make a kind of a movie like in Wimbledon where you can have a commentator and you can have a lot of fun and you can stream it on YouTube, on Twitch or wherever you wanna do it, you can send it live. So it's real fun, it's real fun and you can record your games and watch it later and analyze it, you know, even with a coach. So there's a lot of things you can do. When you're looking at eSports, one of the challenges is that there's a lot of violent games and when the Olympic Games, when the IOC looks at possible Olympic sports, they look at Rocket League and a few others because they're not violent. I could see VR tennis being a possibility because it's not a violent game and it's a traditional game but played in a virtual reality setting. What do you think? Yes, actually it's not only the violence, it's also the physical activity because one of the reasons why I have done this project is my son is addicted to all the shooting games and he's sitting in his room, you know, on his computer and present buttons all the time and I wanted to get him physical active and not just doing the shooting games and doing something which really makes sense in where he learns something but I knew I have to bring something which entertains him which is fun for him where he have rankings and leaderboards and scores and trophies and all that stuff. So with tennis eSports, people not only stop shooting stupid aliens, they start really playing a traditional sport, being active, learn something and getting motivated to go to the real court out to the nature and play tennis. So that was the idea, you know, this hybrid solution. And it kind of reminds you of like we and stuff where they do exercises that are, you know, you use kind of a video or gaming situation and certainly during COVID a lot of people like myself have did a lot of exercise by using Zoom and so I think we understand it more now that we've had to do that. So let's show the next video Hans. Gregory, what does that video show? Well, that is a different kind of hardware. So that game was done between Hans and Gierke with the HTC system with a larger space where they, you know, run around a little bit like five meters width and three meters into the length. And I don't know if you have seen it but they had a real racket in their hands, a real tennis racket with a tracker. And so that was a more authentic feeling of tennis because in the first one, which you have seen me playing against them, we had the Oculus and we had no tennis racket, we had the controls in our hand. And now we have a real racket in the hand which gives a tennis player more authentic feeling because you have the weight, the balance, the feeling, the touch of a tennis racket and that makes it more authentic. So what have you done in order to get this out to the consumer? We are right now in a better phase on the Oculus App Lab and we have a few thousand players right now in the system and we will launch the whole application in the summer with a lot of entertaining features and we will start a tennis league at the end of the year. So we're gonna go out to the gamers, we're gonna go out to the tennis clubs, we're gonna go out to the tennis players, we're gonna go out via social media and via our community to bring it out to the people so they get known to it. So what have people been saying about it as they test it? Well, I always get it, wow, that's actually standard. Everyone who puts down the headset and play VR tennis the first time says, wow, it's unbelievable. That's nice, that's nice, but there must be more than that than just the wow effect. And the more thing which we wanna bring in is the learning skills, the learning which comes with the technique and other things and the fun element of the entertaining and the competition and the real esports thing and price money all that stuff. So that has to come on top of it. So the wow effect is nice to have in the beginning but to have a long lasting players and retention, you need to have the whole package. So is your next move to do golf VR? Well, with our ball physics, you can do all kind of ball sports. It's not only golf, you can do cricket, you can do baseball, you can do table tennis, you can do miniature golf. There's a lot you can do with a ball physics, absolutely. Yeah, actually, I think golf and baseball would be really good applications of this because of the need to practice the swing. And I think that that would give people that opportunity. Absolutely. How do you visualize the future of VR tennis? Well, in the future, it's gonna be far more open and flexible. So for example, you have seen people playing tennis from one country to the other without problems. Well, in the future, you will also go to the net, talk to your opponent, you will have a tennis star there. You're gonna, if you take Andre Agassi, you're gonna ask him, hey Andre, how did you win the last US Open? How was it and how is your family doing? And you go talk to him and he will say, okay, here I give you a fan card and by the way, when I have a t-shirt and all that stuff. And so there's gonna be much more action, much more socializing, much more other stuff going on than just the sport alone. So that's the one part. The other part is gonna be the league, the tennis league. In tennis, you have no New York Yankees against Buffalo, Buffalo, whatever, you have individuals playing in tournaments. You have four grand slams, you have the Davis Cup and that's about it. But there's nothing like the football league, nothing like the NFL, nothing like all these team sports. So I would guess that's gonna come up because prize money is gonna fall in, sponsors are gonna come in, people are gonna appreciate that you don't have to travel anymore. Corona is one part of the thing, but the time consumption to go to tournaments is a second thing. People wanna have quick and fun games. And also the learning, people become more impatient in learning something. They want to be more effective, more efficient if they learn something and not just spending hours and hours to get one move a little bit better. You know, I can also see this is a way people can play tennis in the winter because a lot of people can't. And so it's kind of that same concept of having the treadmill or the Peloton bike or whatever so that you can train inside and then take your skills out to the court in the summer. What do you think about that? Yes, winter is the one side, but if you think about Las Vegas and the desert in summertime, there's no way you would play tennis in the desert or in Saudi Arabia or in southern countries. So yes, weather is a greater factor in the whole thing. Winter and summer, yes. Sure, and so how do you think the pandemic has helped the development and kind of the reception of this? Well, as you know, COVID has accelerated all trends. Gaming became far more popular, you know, popular. The whole virtual sport thing became more popular. Virtual interviews like this one three years ago, not existent, you know, everyone is on Zoom. So the COVID has changed a lot. Our behavior, the way we consume, the way we do sports, the way we train, the way we educate many, many fields. Sure, and let's show the logo video. All right, Gregory, it was great having you on. Can you tell our viewers how people can find more about this and how they can contact you? Yes, well, I think the easiest is, you know, if you have an Oculus Quest, you know, just ask for Tennis Esports demo, and you get our application or you go to our website, tennisesports.com and you find the link there and just try it, you know, it's for free, you know, play tennis, check it out, have fun, and yeah, give me some feedback how you like it. All right, Gregory, thank you so much. I can't wait to try Esports Tennis. Thank you for having me. All right, so thank you to our viewers for joining us today. Make sure to tune in next week. Angela Hazel and I will be talking about Esports risk management. See you then. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.