I'm not a sports person, but your "live action content" made me wonder how awesome it would be to be a sports fan who could view 'the game' from the sideline, or an aerial cam, and to be able to turn and zoom a camera or to switch cameras – as desired! Better yet, to be able 'be the athlete'. Cameras aren't there yet, but imagine being able to watch the scenery as an Olympic down-hill skier as flying downhill - AWESOME possibilities!
Also, OTOY is talking about live streaming. That said, I have spoken with more than one startup that wants to put cameras on athlete's heads/helmets. Dunno how practical it is, but I guess it'll happen eventually.
With VR, the question is (and has always been) "when". As in, "man, that's awesome, when will it actually happen?" Because everything is possible in VR, and that's part of the problem.
Cameras are here, the software is here too, I've actually toyed around with some implementations and they're definitely good enough.
The big problem that scares me is sports licensing and all the legal stuff attached.
VR will allow lots of cool stuff like that :) . One possibility I was thinking about was putting the cameras on the referees instead of the players themselves (for sports such as soccer).
But I think it'll happen as soon as there's a critical mass of people buying VR headsets.
No, unless the athlete is doing power lifting or something trivial.
It's possible an athlete already accustomed to encumbrance wouldn't mind more -- like a few cameras on a football helmet -- but keep in mind that even a GoPro is ~80g, and you need about 3-4 of those to get 360 (mono). Stereo is actually super important, and that requires a lot more cameras.
Personally, I put this in one of those 'future, maybe' categories.
Now, a VR view from courtside seats... well, that's literally already happening. Just look up NextVR, among others (that I'm probably not allowed to talk about).
