One of the things that I realized when I first moved to Louisville to start my position at the University of Louisville was that the city was known for certain things. From the city’s love for UofL athletics (especially basketball) to mint juleps to amazing local cuisine – Louisville has so much to offer! However, one thing is definitely present in the city – the love for horse racing. Churchill Downs is an iconic venue which hosts the Kentucky Derby every year as well as other races. One such race is happening this weekend, which is the Breeder’s Cup.
Horse racing is definitely getting invested in the social media practices as well as mobile technology. The Breeder’s Cup has developed their own iPhone and iPad application for people to download. The application features updates on latest news about the event, maps and weather information, information about betting on the horses as well as resources to previous Breeder Cup races. In many ways, this is a one-stop application for people to use at the Breeder’s Cup.
I think that this is great to have for horse race enthusiasts – the only thing that I would have liked to have seen would have been the integration with augmented reality technology with their applications. While this is still relatively new to social media and mobile technologies for a certain perspective – imagine if people were able to have a virtual display of the horse if they scanned a bar code at the event before they decided to bet on it.
Augmented reality has been integrated and used so much in commercials recently, and I think that this would be a great opportunity for the racing community to embrace and invest in this technology. Potentially looking at what fans are focusing in on as well as being prepared for various situations would be just a few opportunities that augmented reality can offer to the horse racing community.
Also, what about if people wanted to know more information about a particular horse – they could use their phone and camera to view a particular name of a horse (current or previous winners) and the information come to them through the visual layer displayed on the phone. It will be interesting to see if they also have their own personalized QR code, which is becoming easier to do with various sites.
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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