Schedule

Why Research Esports?

Esports now rivals traditional sports, with an audience of over 450 million views and annual revenue of $1 billion USD. For comparison, Major League Baseball has 500 million views and $10.7 billion, while FIFA Soccer has 900 million views and $1.6 billion. Esports also relies heavily on real-time graphics, which is both the field of play for esports athletes and the stadium for its audience. Long before COVID-19, much of esports was remote, making it uniquely prepared to entertain quarantined spectators.

Despite its growing significance and fundamental connection to graphics technology, esports has not received much attention from the SIGGRAPH community.

Challenges, Benefits and Risks

Challenges

To continue its growth, esports faces an array of challenges that will require a deeply multidisciplinary approach:

• Low-latency interactive graphics systems — quick response times are a fundamental advantage, requiring tightly integrated input, rendering, and display components. Realizing such systems may drive fundamental changes in real-time graphics technology, including alternative architectures and pipelines, and create deeper understanding of human perception and performance.
• Effective training methodology — still emerging in esports. A new esports science would help athletes train more effectively, with contributions from sports science, medicine and psychology. Technical opportunities include deeply instrumented analytics and biometrics, visualization, AI training partners, simulation, and specialized training interfaces.

Benefits

Research addressing these challenges will bring a range of broader benefits to society, much as research meeting the needs of film found wide application outside of that industry:

• Esports’ low latency systems could be extremely valuable for training, telemedicine, remote operation and socially immersive video conferencing
• Training methodologies could prove useful in rehab and remote education
• Science itself may benefit, particularly the study of human performance and perception
• The pro-to-amateur product path of traditional sports gives particular optimism: innovative equipment developed for professionals spreads to consumers, driving demand and lowering price

Risks

Any new technology is a mixed blessing, and esports is no different. As the field disseminates esports research results, it should consider and mitigate esports risks:

• Many esports athletes retire at very young ages; training can lack expertise and structure, creating unhealthy environments
• Athletes must deal with rapid evolution of esports: as old games decline, athletes must invest months or years to train in emerging games
• Society’s concern about esports is not surprising — to maintain public support, new esports graphics technologies should address these concerns

Panel Format

The panel was organized into five sections:

1. Introduction (10 min) — Moderator Benjamin A. Watson introduced the panel topic and each panelist
2. Graphics and Visualization (25 min) — 3D environments and abstract overlays that make up any esports experience
3. Latency and Interaction (25 min) — Low-latency systems, their relationship to tasks and visuals
4. Physical and Mental Health (25 min) — Risks to personal and societal well-being and mitigation through improved technologies
5. Conclusion (5 min) — Closing thoughts from panelists

Each section included 5 minutes for audience questions.