It's essentially one of those fitness watches but jammed into a small sensor on a normal scarf. Some people will find it a novelty.
It's not though. It's a privacy invading marketing tool in order to collect as much data as possible about the physiological effects of football which they can then integrate into their future Meta plans for allowing global VR viewing. You're essentially training a piece of AI on how people respond to different events, for free, for use in a future dataset that somebody will purchase for money.
They will claim your data is not personally identifiable and that there's no way to find your specific medical data from using this product. They're wrong, of course. It's like when think that turning off cookies and hiding your IP makes you invisible online. It doesn't, you still use a certain configuration of browser and screen resolution and language setup and addons installed and canvas elements and fonts installed. You still leave a fingerprint that a determined person could find the patterns in, if they were so inclined and had the ability to. Same with physiological data.
City are not full on with the Meta stuff yet but they're in the flirting stage if that makes sense. The work on the virtual Etihad Stadium is already underway. It's a great move for the club as a business and a terrible move for anybody who is a fan or enjoys things like not being a twat.
Here's a primer for which direction this is going to go. City recently released a Roblox app which I was very happy to see. My lad is 6 and loves Roblox and City so I had a go myself up front to check on it. Roblox is a platform in which people build minigames for others to play, for those not aware. So I have a look around it, there's some Blue Moon iconography, a little football mini game, a "quiz", etc and then the City store in the centre. There's lots of collectables too that you can jump around and collect so me presuming that City were trying to get more kids involved, I'm thinking you collect all your badges and play the games to collect enough coins to then get your character a City shirt. Then you can log off that minigame and play all the other minigames wearing your official City shirt. Nope.
The City Store in the Official City Roblox game (a game marketed specifically at the 4-10 age range) has for sale a City scarf, a football, a few other knick knacks and eventually the shirt. These cost real money to purchase. These digital skins for character are purchased using a currency which costs real money.
And therein lies the future. When City get this Meta stuff kicked off, where the virtual people can go to the virtual stadium and watch a virtual football match, they'll be selling virtual shirts for those virtual people costing non-virtual money. No factories or shipping or distribution needed, just a £50 purchase so your Metaverse avatar can have some pixels on their chest changed to a City shirt. Which you'll need of course to be a Top Blue when you go to the VRtihad Stadium on a Saturday afternoon to hang out at the virtual bars before sitting anywhere you want and watching the facsimile of the match. And it will be "just like" being at the game of course because you'll be surrounded by other AI supporters who know exactly how to react, with elements of randomness interspersed to fool the brain that it has a personality, and it will know exactly how to react because the deep learning models have spent the last several years sitting on the neck of real supporters at the Etihad and fixating on every heartbeat increase, every rush of adrenaline, every change in body chemistry, and over time it taught itself what "real supporters" react like to events on the pitch.
You've suffered through modern football. Welcome to the dawn of post-modern football.
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