Skip to main content

Baseball is back — with virtual crowds to fill up empty stadiums

After months of uncertainty, baseball is finally starting back up again — but this time the stadiums will look much different than we are used to. 

Fox Sports will add “virtual fans” to its Major League Baseball (MLB) game broadcasts, starting when the Milwaukee Brewers take on the Chicago Cubs at 10 a.m. PT on Saturday, July 25. The lifelike fans are made a reality in collaboration with Silver Spoon Animation and SMT by using pixotope software to create photorealistic graphics. 

Recommended Videos

No fans? Not on FOX Sports.

Thousands of virtual fans will attend FOX’s MLB games this Saturday. pic.twitter.com/z9oQU0rYuC

— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) July 23, 2020

Please enable Javascript to view this content

The MLB season officially starts today, July 23, about four months after the season was originally scheduled to begin in lateMarch. To fans watching from home, games won’t look much different thanks to the new technology, but the stands will remain empty in reality, and no one will be catching any foul balls. 

Other professional sports leagues are scheduled to start playing again, and there have been plenty of creative ways to solve the problem of empty stadiums. Japanese firm Yamaha came up with the idea of using an app and a bunch of loudspeakers to fill a venue with the noise of fans while you’re watching from home. Fans can tap on a number of preset responses offered on the app, such as applause, cheers, and jeers, to express their feelings as the game unfolds. 

Televised Premier League soccer matches were augmented with digital crowd noise, despite the empty seats still being shown on the screen.

A baseball team in Japan even used Boston Dynamics robots to bring some life to its empty stadiums by providing midgame entertainment for fans watching at home.

While the camaraderie of being around other devoted fans cheering on your team is an essential part of the sports game experience, a survey by ESPN in May suggested U.S. sports fans are cool with watching televised events without spectators.

Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
Chrome incognito just got even more private with this change
The Chrome browser on the Nothing Phone 2a.

Google Chrome's Incognito mode and InPrivate just became even more private, as they no longer save copied text and media to the clipboard, according to Windows Latest. The changes apply to Windows 11 and 10 users and were rolled out in 2024. However, neither Microsoft nor Google documented it.

Even though this change is not a recent feature, it's odd that neither tech giant thought it was worth mentioning. Previously, the default setting was that when a user saved text or images to the clipboard history, it was synced with Cloud Clipboard on Windows. Moreover, accessing this synced content was as simple as pressing the Windows and V keys, which poses a security risk, especially when using incognito mode.

Read more
Google Messages might let you unsend awkward messages in RCS chats
The Google Messages app on the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Google Messages, the default messaging app on Android phones, could soon get new features that will let you unsend texts like third-party messengers. The unsend functionality is reportedly under testing and will be available for chats over RCS protocol, which succeeds traditional SMS with improved support for multimedia, emoji, reactions, etc.

Presently, when you delete a message, it is only removed from your device without impacting other participants in the chat. Now, Google appears to be testing a new "delete for everyone" functionality for conversations that will delete messages for all parties, similar to instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. 9to5Google spotted references to the under-development functionality, suggesting it might be available for a wider audience to benefit from -- though the exact timeline of remains unknown.

Read more
Motorola Razr Plus (2025) could finally get its due processor upgrade
Someone holding the Motorola Razr Plus 2024, showing the back of the phone.

Motorola's flagship clamshell-style foldable, the Moto Razr Plus, is slated for a long-due upgrade in 2025. Latest rumors indicate the phone could get a top-tier Qualcomm chipset, unlike its predecessors that have stopped short of premium in the past.

According to a recent listing on the CPU benchmarking platform Geekbench (via PhoneArena), a device named "Motorola Razr Ultra" has cropped up with impressive CPU specs. That includes an eight-core CPU structure with two cores clocked at 4.32GHz and the other six at 3.53GHz.

Read more