“While walking down a lane, suddenly Jinx, Yasuo, Azir, Ekko, Gragas, Malzahar, and Vi pop out of nowhere and take down each other. The fight ends with Azir and Ekko walking away to go ahead and destroy a bunch of minions.” This might one day be the experience of an audience member while watching an LCS match of LoL.

eSports, or video games even, have always changed with time based on the technology available at the time. So it is only natural to assume and interpret how it would be in the future, and this makes the future of eSports seem only more interesting. As to what exactly would happen to it in the future can only be found out in time since none of us are “fortunetellers”.

Recently technology has seen a lot of major breakthroughs. One of this being the Virtual Reality (VR) technology. This technology allow users to stream a video as though the user actually is present in it and can interactively watch it. The technology has since been adapted by various companies into their own VR devices. It wasn’t very far away before this technology found its way into Video Games allowing players to see the video game universe from a first person perspective. Though initially such VR devices were expensive and hard to obtain, they have slowly become cheaper and more accessible. Quite a few video game companies have even released many video games that can be played using such VR devices. It won’t be long before such devices become as common as a keyboard or mouse in an eSports tournament.

Omni directional treadmills are also an up and coming technology in the said field. These treadmills can be hooked up to a video game and if coupled with some sort of controller could well replace the need for a keyboard or mouse. Such a treadmill would allow players to control in game character movements and the controller would allow the control of in game character actions. Such a system was used earlier this year by Virtuix to host the first ever Virtual Reality eSports tournament. They connected 4 HTC Vive headsets to 4 of its Omni multidirectional treadmills, allowing players to pick up a replica gun and run through a virtual arena in a competitive multiplayer FPS called Omni Arena.

The Virtuix hosted event was just one the beginnings of VR in the eSports field. Currently extensive research is going on in the field of brain wave detection and manipulation. This is a promising field and will probably find its way into eSports allowing players to play games even while sitting still and controlling the in game character with their brain alone.

This change in technology will not only change how players play a game, but will also change how spectators watch a game as well. Just imagine being able to walk down the Dust 2 map watching players shoot each other down and diffusing bombs, or maybe standing near the Roshan watching it being killed by champions. Whatever the game be, the spectator experience gets taken to a whole new level allowing them to interact with the game in a totally different way.

10-20 years down the line eSports will look like a couple of guys sitting on chairs with a headset mounted on them playing the game with their minds, and the spectators too would have such headsets, walking around the game watching everything and anything they want. It sounds like Sci-Fi, I know, but let me remind you that the radio was Sci-Fi in the 1700s.