Fight fans have been offered virtual cage-side seats as a new fighting frontier is launched
The UFC and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have combined to give fight fans an opportunity to sit cage-side at a mixed martial arts event from the comfort of their own living rooms, with the first such event being broadcast on Friday night.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has made significant strides in developing a world of virtual reality technology, investing billions of dollars in its increasingly maligned ‘Metaverse’ platform – but if that still has a way to go before being fully adopted by its potential user base, Zuckerberg and Meta appear confident that virtual reality will represent a new frontier when it comes to watching MMA.
The partnership between Meta and the UFC was announced earlier this week and came after Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan attended a fight card at the UFC’s Apex facility outside Las Vegas after UFC boss Dana White revealed in the days prior that the event was being closed off to fans and media.
The new tech saw its proof of concept debut at a Legacy Fighting Alliance (LFA) fight card on Friday. LFA is broadcast on the UFC’s digital platform Fight Pass.
If you were wondering how the LFA VR looks, this was Yuma Horiuchi's finish just now #LFA144 pic.twitter.com/Xydi6I8SGL
— caposa (@Grabaka_Hitman) October 15, 2022
This is what it looks like entering the "arena" pic.twitter.com/u5Pct2FWsO