SBJ Tech: Digital twins for venues -- tiny details, big payoffs

3D Digital Venue enables fans to drop directly into seats before they buy them. The Spanish company creates virtual versions of sports venues for mapping, seat charting and ticket-purchase flow integrations. Cofounder/Head of International Business Development Francis Casado estimates that clients who integrate 3DDV ticket mapping into their sites see a 2.5% to 5% higher conversion rate. It’s also resulted in higher group sales success because of 3D Digital Venue’s easier seat-grouping tool.

He pointed out that the granularity the company produces venues in -- a 99.9% accuracy in the representations that are built with the Unity and Unreal video game engines -- can find use for so much more.

"We come from the box office, the ticket-sales area, but our technology has been expanding throughout the venue,” Casado told SBJ. “We are taking the fan into the stadium, but we could take them into the concourse, into the locker room, etc.”

Digital twins are proving their value, with the likes of OnePlan helping to plan large-scale events like the Olympics and the recent push by Kraft Sports and Entertainment and The Kraft Group to work with Team D3 on a Gillette Stadium-Patriot Place replica .

3D Digital Venue provides an experiential magnifying glass to the ticket-purchasing process, placing fans in individual seats for 360-degree views of the stadium (for an example, click around this creation of the Mets’ Citi Field ).

The company has 65 sports-related partnerships worldwide, with 70% of those in North America. It is also in the middle of a multiyear deal with MLB to digitize its venues, which integrates with MLB.com and the Ballpark app as a component of its online ticket purchasing.

3D Digital Venue can build 2D mappings based on publicly available information, but a partnership with clubs, leagues, venues or construction companies becomes the source of important infrastructure materials that rachet up the details that 3D Digital Venue’s mapping algorithms can produce.

More than a ticketing tool

The 3D view also provides defining details and examples of branding in the space. A team rep could show potential corporate sponsors what their signage might look like around the venue or walk prospective premium suite customers through offerings. Casado said that Snapdragon Stadium is an excellent example -- the venue first used 3D Digital Venue for its mapping, which eventually became a marketing tool as well.

3D Digital Venue came out of the real estate industry, landing their first sports client in La Liga’s Athletic Bilbao in 2012. Since then, the company has worked with the Spanish top-flight at the league level, expanded to the U.K. and is now a fixture in North America.

The league-wide efforts, like those relationships with La Liga and MLB, enable 3D Digital Venue to unify a broader experience for the broader fan base, which Casado sees as a collective win.

“Everyone is going to use the same technology and the same online ticket purchase flow,” Casado said. “For a fan, it’s going to be the same experience here and there. It's something that has been very well received.”

Listo's origin story came out of a previous venture by its founders called Kallpod, which sought to ease the communication struggle between guest and server in the hospitality industry.

It became the groundwork for Listo's software product to improve inter-staff communication and task management for hospitality spaces. "Essentially, we're helping everyone get from Point A to Point B, when and where they need to be somewhere, whether that's front of the house or in the back of the house," said Ross Chesnick, COO of Listo .

The company is streamlining F&B communications in sports venues, which often rely on older communications models like walkies-talkies and headsets. Listo works with dozens of sports and entertainment entities, with sports-related clients including Levi's Stadium, Hard Rock Stadium and SoFi Stadium.

Chesnick said Listo (founded in 2022) had its earliest experiences boosting the premium areas for Arrowhead Stadium and Ford Field, its two initial sports venue clients. Its work there, which Chesnick said benefited from existing synergies with concessionaire Levy Restaurants, provided fans with options to click a button or scan a QR code for server attention.

"They had a high need in their premium section for what we provided, and that was really being able to augment the human experience with technology," Chesnick said.

Working with Listo starts with a dashboard to manage staff and their locations in a venue. From there, a manager has a view of real-time task management. They can use the platform to see activity breakdown by individual suites, which staff members are dealing with the most requests and if support is needed in a certain area due to an influx of orders.

Task and request notifications can be sent to workers via Samsung Galaxy watches with reconfigured hardware for Listo use or the Listo app. The platform is offered on a license basis, with prices starting at $24.99/month per user.

The need for clear communication pathways between server and guest are always top priority, which is what Listo's mission essentially boils down to.

"There's a full accountability engine in there as well to really assign staff and also see exactly what they're doing," Chesnick said.

It would be a double fault -- pun shamefully intended -- if I didn’t point out the tennis-related tech coverage provided by my colleague Rob Schaefer while on location at the Cincinnati Open, which started Sunday and runs through the start of next week.

The event’s home venue, the Lindner Family Tennis Center, is in the middle of a two-year renovation that will cost $260 million . Some of those enhancements include new LED displays from SMT, nearly 200 climate-controlled seating options on baselines and a camera for queue observation at the Mazunte food court.

The software for monitoring food lines is from WaitTime, a company that I’ve been particularly intrigued by. Founded in 2014 out of Detroit, WaitTime anonymously measures crowd flow and is an Intel AI partner. It's worked in the sports industry before, and if you’ve never seen their crowd intelligence at work, here’s a quick virtual demo from the WaitTime website. Really intriguing stuff. This tech could improve so many aspects of the fan queue experience.

Have any of our SBJ Tech readers used/continue to use WaitTime? I’d love to hear about your experience at ejoyce@sportsbusinessjournal.com .

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