It’s always great when industry and academia collaborate esports is the perfect environment for productive and innovative projects.  One example Weavr ( https://weavr.tv/ ) is a platform that uses live and historic data to create meaningful and personalised mixed-reality experiences for esports fans. On the podcast Steph & Brian talk to Anders Drachen & Florian Block from the Arena Research Cluster (ARC) at the University of York who work with companies like ESL to develop Weavr.  The ARC is a global community of researchers from across academia and industry who work with esports and sports analytics.

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The Arena Research Cluster (ARC) is a global community that connects researchers and industry stakeholders who share a focus on innovation in esports. They facilitate knowledge exchange, collaboration and impact driven research. ARC is the vehicle through which researchers and professionals can connect, share resources and start new partnerships and collaborations.  They define innovation as introducing novel approaches, technologies, and means of knowledge generation that explore, enrich or otherwise advance understanding in or across the three interlinked pillars of esports (and sports) entertainment: competitive play, content production and audience experiences.  With innovations from esports translating into traditional sports (and vice versa) ARC’s remit spans esports, physical sports and motorsports. An ongoing government-funded collaborative project, Weavr explores new audience experiences posed by the coming together of new forms of data analytics and immersive technologies in the context of esports. The project brings together partners with extensive expertise in a range of areas relating to the creation of data-driven audience experiences including ESL, a leading global esports company and Dock10, the largest studio operator in the UK. As University research partners, ARC members provide expertise in game analytics and the development of new data-driven content forms from a user-experience perspective. Find out more here! 

Anders is on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/andersdrachen or check out his website https://andersdrachen.com/

Florian is on Twitter https://twitter.com/blockflorian and his website is http://florianblock.net/

Esports Research Network Presenters:

Dr. Brian McCauley https://twitter.com/DrBrianMcCauley https://ju.se/center/mmtc/people/researchers/2019-03-07-brian-mccauley.html

Dr. Stephanie Orme https://twitter.com/stephanieorme https://www.emmanuel.edu/academics/our-faculty/stephanie-orme.html

https://twitter.com/EsportsResNet https://www.twitch.tv/esportsresearchnetwork

Music by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com