This is the technology behind the realistic experience of NBA 2K18

What differentiates fiction from reality, the simulacrum of the lived? It is not necessary to go back to the dreams of the fierce Segismundo man in Calderon's work: fiction is increasingly closer to the intangible textures of reality, to those nuances that make the valley of disbelief float.

If we talk about NBA, the basketball league par excellence, I am sure in the fiction it is clear: NBA 2K has become a capital saga not only within the video industry, but as a reference to talk about sport .This saga understands as none that, in the basket, everything adds up.And it is the sum of its parts, spectacle, daily life and media pomp, which turns the noble art of hitting the ball into a much more elaborate alchemy. Related

Visual Concepts is a developer from Novato, California, a veteran industry firm that has been working since the late 80s.In fact, it can be said that have defined how to understand this sport within a console .

GIVE ME MORE NUMBERS!

The NBA records statistics since 1943.Since then we have an archive of threefold, we know the amount of rebounds of each player, we can intuit when a rookie has star wood and when an escort is in its lowest hours: this data chain has devoured the industry itself and turned the NBA into the sport of figures .

To this we must add technologies such as the Instant Replay , implemented in the 2014/15 season.High performance zoom cameras calculate the trajectory of the ball and track the possible physical variations: telemetry in real time.The coverage, defense time is analyzed, it is estimated even if someone fell before falling, analyzing mass by speed.And that fall, we can be sure, will be seen by the 94 HD monitors that archive the match.

Moreover, SportVU technology demonstrates the true importance of Big Data within the basket.Now shooting statistics are no longer generated: the possession of the ball, speed of play, distance traveled, separation between players are analyzed...an extensive glossary of numbers that pass through the hands of STATS.

And why do we tell all this? The Visual Concepts video game makes a profit from all this to the level of database sharing: when a player makes a risky move because he is tired, there is a precedent of risky moves on that player's chip.Of course, there is always a percentage of randomness, of improvisation.Real data for realistic situations.And of realism has been led to its playful paroxysm.

IS THAT SPORT THAT WE DO WITH THE COMMAND?

Let's approach, for example, shooting technology .NBA 2K17 had a somewhat more temperamental and anarchic style of shooting than 2K16.It was the way to tell us that life is not as schematic as filling a stamina bar and drop at the right time.NBA 2K18 has gone further in its approach to chaotic perfection, directly eliminating the drawbar and placing a small indicator at the top of the screen.If as a player you were accustomed to «Observe», you will be disappointed.

The current goal is for the perfect shot to be searched on the court, not within a virtual graphic.Homogenize and embrace the physicality of the sport.To achieve the perfect shot, we now need good coverage, good timing in the shot, freeing ourselves from the defenses at the right time, etc.And all this rewarding with a little help: the command vibrates when we are under that auspicious moment of shooting.

How is this change? In that we, as players, begin ignoring the bar for not looking and focus on feeling that vibration.A synesthetic experience, almost Zen, that invites us more to think with the rest of the meaning and dedicate our eyes to what happens on the court.Playing basketball has never been so "human" before.

This affects, in the last place, how we handle and recover the ball, as we avoid defenders and bargain impossible moves between two gigantic columns of sweaty meat.By studying the movements of real professionals, this contact has been replicated: the rebound, the fight in thefts or the contact with the player's arm or leg.A collision engine, by the way, that was started during the previous delivery.

DEFENSIVE POSITIONING

This is the technology behind the realistic experience of NBA 2K18

Basketball is a beloved sport among physicists.The Magnus effect goes hand in hand with other physical principles that go back to Galileo postulates.Another of the technologies that convert NBA 2K18 into a constant flow is its new player positioning system ; inheritance, as we said at the beginning, of collecting and filtering the data of each game.This especially affects the defenses, in their way of moving and adapting to the different game systems.

And it is that the relationship between 2K and the NBA itself is so intimate that it grants "metabromas" to both sides of the real world.Wouldn't it be the greatest achievement for a professional player to be on the cover of this game? Except when real cases happen that surpass all predictive logic, NBA 2K18 is already able to translate what happens outside the court inside.

REPLICATING FACE: FACE-SCANNING

The face-scanning is a technology developed by Visual Concepts that scans our face using photodetection.On a three-dimensional mesh with up to 15,000 reference points, the software analyzes between 10 and 15 photographs and, based on the angle and illumination of the images, triangulates a position for each point, different in each person.

In this way, the game manages, with greater or lesser fortune, to emulate the topography of our face-the photos must cover up to a 60 ° angle-yes, the character we control is still a digitized version of us The final goal of every simulator: to give us the opportunity to be the next star of the entire federation, to ascend from university sponsorship to fit the champion's ring.

Images | Pixabay, 2K Sports

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