The World Cup Is Quietly Making a Case for Smart Glasses in Sports

Unless you live in a remote enchanted forest or underground like an actual mole person, you’ve probably noticed that the World Cup is happening. As usual, it’s a spectacle, not just because soccer (or football, for most of the world) is the most popular sport across the globe, but because something is different this year—and no, I’m not talking about the aggravating, forced hydration breaks. I’m talking about the new perspective—literally.

This year, for those of us not lucky or rich enough to get to a game, there’s a new camera angle in play: the ref cam. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a camera attached to the referee that gives viewers a first-person glimpse at what happened on the field.

Not realizing that ref cams would be a thing, it caught me by surprise. It’s unlike any other vantage I’ve seen in the pro sports that I typically watch, which includes American football (the more violent kind), hockey, and a scant bit of basketball. It’s also thanks to a form factor that looks strangely familiar: a head-worn camera. Attached to the heads of refs in this year’s FIFA World Cup is a headset, and that headset has a camera on it.

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Brazil's goal to make it 1-1 as seen on the ref cam