How Blind People Play Football

Pepsi is funding amazing ideas that refresh the world. Åkestam Holst and Society 46 created The Sound of Football to give visually impaired people a better football experience and maybe, in the future, create new aides that enable you to see with sound.

As a first test, we arranged a football match between a team of visually impaired players and a team of former professional footballers. We wanted to see how they would perform under equal conditions – in a match where no one can see. How it works: We used tracking technology, the same used at the latest FIFA World Cup. Through the system we can get the position of each player in real time on the football pitch. This information is then fed into an iPhone located on each player’s head and converted into binaural 3D sound. We created sounds for things important on the pitch like the nearest players, the ball and the goals. Through headphones each player can hear what is happening and get a sense of distance between things. And the sensors in the iPhone allow players to locate where the sounds come from when they move their head.