In Brief:
- Tennis Australia collaborates with Decentraland to host the Australian Open as a metaverse tournament.
- A virtual recreation of key areas in Melbourne Park will be available for the entire tournament.
- Tennis Australia and Metaverse Project Manager Ridley Plummer noted that AO plans to continue working with Decentraland in the long term.
Tennis Australia joined hands with Decentraland to host the Australian Open as a virtual tennis tournament making it the first official tennis grand slam to be held in the metaverse.
The tournament titled ‘AO Decentraland’ is launching on 17th January 2022 and will continue till 30th January.
The metaverse venture will provide fans with unrestricted access to the Australian Open from anywhere in the world.
A virtual recreation of core areas in Melbourne Park, from the Rod Laver Arena to the Grand Slam Park, will be available for the entire length of the AO.
Exclusive content for virtual viewers is said to include behind-the-scenes video from over 300 cameras in and around the park, as well as player entrance areas and the practice village.
Fans can walk around the city to get to the Beach House and the Gram Slam Oval, where live and historic matches will be shown on screens.
Ridley Plummer, Tennis Australia and Metaverse Project Manager, wishes that the Australian Open would become the “world’s most accessible and inclusive sports and entertainment event.”
“With the unique challenges fans have faced getting to Melbourne, we’ve fast-tracked our launch into the Metaverse,” Plummer stated.
Given the COVID-19 pandemic, which has made it extremely difficult for many fans to travel to Melbourne to witness the event in person, this metaverse project is a blessing. The 2021 AO faced several challenges, including low on-site spectator numbers.
Plummer also noted that bringing the AO into the metaverse was a critical step in providing “truly global access” to the event. Plummer confirmed that the AO plans to continue working with Decentraland in the long term.
Plummer further stated that Tennis Australia was considering the option of establishing a year-round property in the Metaverse.
The AO also announced a new collaboration with NFT platform Sweet aiming to drop six NFT collections commemorating the AO’s last five decades.
To align with the tournament, the NFT collections would be released periodically between the 17th and 27th of January.
The AO also dropped a collection of 6,776 NFTs called Art Ball NFTs separately on OpenSea earlier this week.
Plummer confirmed that the collection sold out in three minutes after it went live, with a floor price of 0.26 ETH (approximately $875) and a trading volume of 223 ETH ($751,287).
This is not the Australian Open’s first venture in the Metaverse. The AO hosted the Fortnite Summer Smash, an esports event with a $100,000 prize money, in 2020.
Tennis Australia also went on to lease virtual land from Vegas City, a company that owns huge areas of the metaverse.
In the first week of this year, tech giant Samsung also announced a partnership with Decentraland to explore the metaverse. The launch involves Samsung’s first-ever metaverse-mixed-reality dance party, hosted live from the physical Samsung location on January 8.
