Extended reality cultures in sport

Katerina Girginova

Chapter 8 in Handbook on Sport and Culture, 2025, pp 106-121 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Culture is a malleable and generative practice, and sport, as an expression of culture, has an established history of being a catalyst for various social, organizational, and technological innovations. This chapter specifically focuses on sport's longstanding tradition of innovation through the testing, employing, and showcasing of new technologies, many of which seep into daily use beyond a sporting context and thus undergo a further transformation of meaning and practice. The latest episode in this history of sport innovation includes extended reality (XR) technologies, which are increasingly utilized for the planning and delivery of sport experiences. Yet, due to their rapid and diverse application, there is not a clear conceptualization of consumer XR technologies and experiences within the realm of sport, nor a solid understanding of their fundamental properties. In turn, there is a lack of comprehension around how the use of XR media contributes toward a sporting culture of innovation and, more broadly, toward cultural innovation. This chapter helps to fill these gaps in extant knowledge by examining how new meanings and practices arise from the use of XR media in sport. To do so, the chapter first conducts a brief survey of the employment of XR technologies within the context of consumer sport experiences and teases out the key properties of XR media: spatiality, physicality, and interactivity. Next, this chapter introduces Hall's (1966) core dimensions of culture (contextual and temporal orientation, as well as proxemics), and uses these dimensions as heuristics in analyzing XR media experiences to map out spaces of communicative innovation. The chapter concludes with some critical avenues for further thought around the mutually constitutive relationships between sport, cultural innovation, and XR media.

Keywords: Extended reality; XR; Culture; Sport; Media; Virtual reality; Augmented reality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035339976
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