I wonder if they have looked into air curtains. Commercial installations are at a point where you have this silent, completely invisible sheet of fast-moving air that provides some degree of noise isolation as well - maybe four walls of these + a floating ceiling is enough when coupled with the noise-cancelling headphones.
In Age of Empires tournaments, they simply put the players in a different room from the casters/audience, with live streaming cameras. Maybe because live audiences are relatively rare in these tournaments, there's less of a demand for players to be physically in the same room as the audience?
The former Westinghouse Electric Sharon Transformer Plant is a 58-acre facility located in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. They built substation transformers there. To test them the rolled them into a sound proof room, on a rail car, to listen for hum. Lose windings would vibrate causing hum and generate damaging heat. When I was there I was told that if wanted to rent it, they would fix the 440V door system (someone took the cooper).<p>To give you a size perspective of this place, our tour guide, from the balcony, said "See that toy truck down there? That is a full size 18-wheeler." It took us a 20 minute walk to reach that full size truck that looked like a child's toy in this MASSIVE room.
That the players can see each other also allows for some mindgames, for example “the paper” <a href="https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared</a>
A bit off topic. But this site is auto translated? Its in Dutch for me and reads like a llm translated piece of text. Very unpleasant to read with overly long sentences and weird expressions.
Could you delay the large screens, commentaries, and live broadcast by 3-5 seconds (or more) such that any information gained from leaked noise would have minimal impact to the players? This would make ANS headphones viable
this photo from the article amazes me: <a href="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37cd40d60d7e6127986ff16e5349ffbcd76cf0e.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37c...</a><p>that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds
I guess the allure of physical events is twofold, to feel a connection with other fans and to feel a connection with the players. I wonder if this diminishes the latter. Maybe put the players somewhere else entirely and stream it in the form of these stage holograms.
Actual title:<p>"Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence"<p>Is this actually by Valve employees? Or just with Valve's funding?
This is a great article and I understand the need for the booths, but to me personally, they look horrible. It looks as if the players are sitting in a kiosk. Surely it would make for a much more enveloping experience for the spectators if the players were in an open space.
It was definitely an interesting article but the first sentence of the article proper really grabbed me.<p>The weird thing to me about the world is you can have an event that literally millions of people watch around the world, and if you had asked me “what’s the International” five minutes ago I wouldn’t have had any idea, and I’m a very online person! I play video games, even, and at one point played DOTA2!<p>The internet has totally fractionated our culture to subcultures within subcultures, to the point where when people meet in person they have nothing to talk about. Down with the monoculture and all that.<p>It’s astounding how much money and thought and effort went into building the booths too! This is the least surprising part: there is a lot of money sloshing around in the world. The amount of talent to build soundproof booths so people can comfortably play a video game in front of a bunch of people is wild.
Aging myself here... I played a ton of DOTA on the WarCraft3 engine... probably when I should have been studying for engineering finals.<p>What amazed me about the game, and probably why it is so addictively fun to play is you always have two competing things gripping for your attention. On one hand, resource farming _demands_ incredible attention to detail (obtaining the last shot on creeps for a kill, ergo a gold reward). Then on the other hand, you must also be planning your character's build, monitoring minimap, monitoring others' builds, and most especially watching missing enemy players. It's hard to do all of the things effectively... one has to make the farming aspect of the game second nature and remove the distraction to be a good player. (Which I never was)<p>I don't have the luxury of spare time to play long DOTA games anymore, and largely I've replaced it with building things and outdoor sports (MTB racing, Gravel Racing, climbing) but I still look fondly at those times and the IRL and online friend group I had.
Valve seems like such a blank check company, able to jump onto projects and apply so much effort to things thanks to their resources<p>Would love to see more about what they’re doing and how they’re organized recently (an updated employee handbook?)
I was served the Dutch translation, and I must say I am impressed with the state of the art of this machine translation. While this still feels mechanically translated English, and accents are missing, it was very readable. I am used to having to translate each individual word to English and swap some verbs to end up with something readable -- with the regular paragraph of total gibberish in between. This reads like at least a high school student's homework.
Unfortunately, they serve a machine translated version of the blog text. Well, I don't even know. The language is technically correct I guess, but completely without life and using expressions that one would use in english. That's not bad for an automatic translation.
I don’t understand their setup:<p>- Standard stage/audienxe inclination is 4%, so you’d think they’d set it up at 4% or above… Nope, they incline the windows towards the ground! To wit, they had to transform the ceiling into glass panels, which shows they did have the problem of audience seeing from atop, which adds weight which they later say was one of their major problem. Talk about solving a problem by adding another problem.<p>- Their entire setup has big white beams everywhere, there’s no angle where the audience can see clearly. Why not having seams?<p>- My house has larger glass panels than that, and they are soundproof for the highway.<p>Surely it was possible to ship bigger glass panels, simpler design, oriented towards the top so that the roof can be plain.
Is this supposed to be impressive. A company who owns a money printing machine is able to build multiple layers of glass with argon pumped between them?<p>Sorry, not impressed.
I don’t really get esports or regular sports for that matter, but this seems like overkill? How much of an advantage could they really get from someone yelling at them in the audience? With a decent audience they are rarely going to hear anything other than a din anyway.<p>Doesn’t seem like much more of an advantage than people yelling things at baseball players?<p>Seems like it could just be part of the calculation of the competition rather than working so hard to avoid it.