In a historic turn of events, Crystal Palace has become the first football club in the world to offer their visually impaired fans permanent technology.
Allowing its visually impaired users to sit in their season ticket seats and stream live footage of the game without missing out on the matchday experience, the Give Vision headset technology relies on a private 5G network at Selhurst Park.
Working by stimulating photoreceptor cells in the eyes’ retinas, headset requires the user to have some existing vision.
The new technology has two main functions. While the first function acts as a giant magnifying glass, allowing fans to zoom in on moments on the pitch and around the stadium, the second, takes footage live from the host broadcast feed to give fans the opportunity to watch the game in real-time without delay – similar to how someone would watch at home on television.
Two million people in the UK are living with sight loss, with 340,000 registered as blind or partially sighted according to the NHS.
There are plans in the work to roll out the Give Vision headset technology to other Premier League clubs in the future but for now, hats off to Palace for paving the way and making the game more accessible to fans everywhere.
