VR and the NBA

Live sports are always an exciting way to spend a day out. However, tickets aren’t always easy to come by. But what if you could experience courtside seats to an NBA game this season — from the comfort of your couch?

This is made possible by Virtual Reality (VR), a technology that puts you courtside to witness the action with your favorite team. VR platforms can offer a suite of basketball-centric features to elevate your virtual courtside perspective, such as the ability to host watch parties, watch game highlights, recaps, and archival content, and even play interactive mini-games.

NBA fans can watch virtual reality games with devices like the Meta Quest VR headset. Meta Quest brings an immersive NBA experience to fans for the 2024–2025 season with a lineup of 52 live games that are available to attend digitally. This technology has the potential to make watching sports at home just as immersive and exciting as live sports!

So how does ticketing work for virtual reality basketball games? Fans in the United States can view select live NBA games in virtual reality for FREE through a Meta Quest device in both the Xtadium app and in the NBA Arena in the Meta Horizon Worlds app (View the full NBA VR schedule here). So, if you already own a VR device, it’s as easy as deciding to attend! If the prices of courtside tickets seem outrageous these days, this is a great alternative for fans to enjoy the courtside action.

Granted, recent reviews of the VR experience for the current season sound promising, opinions have been mixed on the experience. One reddit user posted that the best part of it was watching the warmups before the game, where you can enjoy the perspective of sitting underneath the basket watching the players do layups, hearing their laughter and feeling the camaraderie. However, many viewers feel that a major issue to watching a VR game is that you don’t have all six degrees of freedom; meaning that the positioning can feel unnatural, forcing you to turn your head constantly to keep up with the game. But one thing we can be sure of is that with growing popularity, the VR experience for NBA games will continue to improve over time.

So, what’s your take? Will you be enjoying the NBA in VR?