In coordination with Super Bowl 50 at Levi’s Stadium, TechCrunch partnered with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the National Football League on 1st & Future, a competition for startups looking to advance the stadium experience, enhance how fans enjoy the game at home and improve the performance and safety of athletes.
Radd3, one of the startups competing in the Tomorrow’s Athlete category of the competition, unveiled an early prototype of DimeTime, a realistic and intuitive virtual reality football training system that helps players train in a high-resolution virtual environment with the HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR headsets.
Unlike other VR training solutions, DimeTime doesn’t require extensive video recording setups to be installed on the field. Instead, DimeTime is a true virtual reality solution, converting playbooks into virtual experiences that players can interact with dynamically. CEO Andrew Won says the team can convert an entire NFL playbook into VR content in less than a week.
Since the event, DimeTime has launched their full product aimed at NFL and NCAA teams. A more mass-market version of the product aimed at high school athletes is due out this fall.
Among the improvements is a tablet-based app that allows coaches to instantly create new plays in real time. Within seconds of the coach drawing up the new play, players can use their VR headset to run and practice the play instantaneously.
In early July, Radd3 closed a $2.2 million Series A financing round led by hardware manufacturer HTC. Presence Capital also participated in the funding round.
In addition to the funding, Radd3 CEO Andrew Won tells TechCrunch that the company entered into a strategic collaboration agreement with HTC that gives Radd3 access to valuable technical and business resources that the company can use to improve their products and strengthen their business.
“The Vive is the best available VR device for sports training because it has very precise positional tracking that enables players to interact with our virtual reality football training environment instead of just passively viewing things,” Won tells TechCrunch. “And the Vive can be used while standing up, which is a better way to train.”
“Having a high-profile event with presentation deadlines and great critical input leading up to the event forced us to put in the elbow grease to do it right,” said Won. “The time and effort that we had to put in to get ready for NFL 1st & Future really helped us focus and polish our presentations to HTC and Presence Capital.”
We can’t wait to see how Radd3’s story progresses over the next several months, and we’re excited to learn about the next wave of startups set to take the stage in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016.
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