One Small Device, Staggering Engineering: How OneCourt Compresses a Live Stadium Into a Tablet Blind Fans Can Feel

A Few Seconds Too Late

I’ve been talking with Top Tech Tidbits blind and low-vision readers for more than two decades now, and in all those years two things have come up again and again. They love sports. But following a live game in real time, the way a sighted fan does, has been almost impossible.

Radio lags. A companion narrates a half-step behind the roar of the crowd. The final score arrives, but the feeling of the game does not. So when I tell you that a device about the size of a tablet can now let a blind fan feel the play happening, at the same instant as everyone around them, please know that I do not say it lightly.

That device is OneCourt, and it invented what it calls the tactile broadcast. As an engineer, what stops me is not only that it works. It’s how much engineering is packed into something so small. OneCourt has quietly compressed an entire live stadium into a surface you read with your fingertips. One small device. Staggering engineering.

What a Tactile Broadcast Actually Is

Start with the object in your hands. OneCourt is a haptic tablet paired with interchangeable raised silicone overlays, one for each sport, that map the court or field. In the company’s own words, it takes “ball and player positional data that’s tracked at the league level” and translates it into “our own haptic language, which feels like a series of trackable vibrations.”

Today it covers four sports, basketball, football, baseball, and soccer, and OneCourt describes itself as growing across five major U.S. sports. One device handles all of them. You change the sport by changing the overlay.

Where the Data Comes From

Here’s the first thing that made me sit up. The device does not watch the game. It does not point a camera at the court and try to work out where the ball is. Instead, it taps the official tracking feeds the leagues already produce, what OneCourt calls “existing data infrastructure, which is already in place for every major sports league.” The at-home product is powered by official NFL, NBA, and MLB live data.

It helps to understand just how much infrastructure that already is. In the NFL, every player wears RFID tags tucked under the shoulder pads, and there’s one inside the football itself, read by more than twenty ultra-wideband receivers ringing the stadium. The system locates the players about ten times a second and the ball about twenty-five times a second, to within roughly six inches. That technology, behind the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, runs on hardware from Zebra Technologies and the Amazon Web Services cloud. In the NBA, twelve cameras in the catwalks of every arena run Sony’s Hawk-Eye optical tracking, capturing each player’s position around sixty times a second, at twenty-nine points on the body.

That is a staggering amount of real-time data, and the leagues have already paid to build it. OneCourt’s quiet stroke of genius was to ride on top of it.

From the Cloud to Your Fingertips

So how does that ocean of coordinates become something you can feel? OneCourt takes the league’s positional data and translates it, in the cloud, into its proprietary haptic language. The translation is the company’s core intellectual property, and it is patent pending. OneCourt is a Microsoft AI for Accessibility grantee, which is part of how it built that pipeline.

Getting it to the device fast is its own challenge. In a venue, the board is, in OneCourt’s words, “WiFi or 5G Enabled” for a “reliable real-time experience.” At home, the tablet pairs with a free OneCourt app on your iPhone or Android and pulls the live feed over Wi-Fi or cellular. No special hardware. No camera to install. The promise OneCourt makes to the fan is plain: you feel every pitch, dunk, and touchdown in real time, and you no longer experience a lag in hearing the game from a friend or a partner.

That is the heart of the title. Thousands of position updates a second, rendered onto a surface small enough to hold and fast enough to feel live. An entire stadium, compressed.

The Smartest Decision in the Whole Design

If you want to know why I respect this product as an engineer, it comes down to one early decision. OneCourt had a choice. It could build its own data pipeline, install cameras in arenas, and use computer vision to pull the ball and player positions out of the video. Or it could partner with the leagues and use the tracking data they already collect. OneCourt chose to partner. The credit, in founder Jerred Mace‘s telling, goes to his co-founder and COO, Antyush Bollini, who saw that “the teams and leagues are already investing in data infrastructure,” and that OneCourt could “divert a technical risk into a business opportunity.”

That single choice is why the whole thing works at scale. Because OneCourt does not have to install anything to capture the game, the device is effectively plug and play. A venue can offer it without re-wiring the building. The hardware stays affordable, which is how it can be free to fans in the arena and reasonably priced at home. And any league that already tracks its games becomes a candidate to be added next.

Translation: they made it inexpensive and able to scale by refusing to rebuild what the leagues had already built. That’s not a shortcut. That’s good engineering.

What It Feels Like to Use

Here’s what it’s actually like to use. You rest your palms flat on the overlay and feel the shape of the play move beneath them. Dr. Kirk Adams, the former president and CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind and an advisor to OneCourt, has described feeling a basketball play synced to the radio call: a rebound, the ball moving rapidly side to side as it was passed up the court, and then the basket, all of it arriving as vibrations under his hands.

Baseball may be even more striking in the detail it conveys. He could feel where each pitch crossed the strike zone, low and away, then high and inside. He could follow the flight of a batted ball out to where it was caught in the outfield. And when runners were on base, vibrating indicators at the bases told him exactly where they stood, so he no longer had to carry all of that in his head the way he used to when he only had the radio.

Touch tells you where and when. For everything touch cannot say, the score, the player names, the outcome, OneCourt adds generative audio description, and the device can be synced with your favorite broadcast. The two senses together are the entire point. In OneCourt’s own usability study, blind and low vision fans rated their comprehension 74.3 percent higher using the combination of haptics and generative audio than with traditional radio alone.

Why Blind Fans Have Been Waiting for This

From my vantage point as a publisher of assistive technology news, none of this surprises me. Readers have told me for years how much they love sports, and how much they have wanted a real way in. There is a difference between being told what happened, and experiencing it yourself, in the moment, and forming your own read on the game. Jerred Mace says it well. The power, in his words, is in experiencing the game “independently and to form your own interpretations,” and in the joy that comes with that freedom.

Mace didn’t arrive at this from the outside. He grew up, as he puts it, in a household where disability “was very much the norm,” and he found his own ways into sports as a kid. That lived experience is all over the design. This is not a novelty built to impress sighted onlookers. It’s a serious tool built alongside the people who use it.

And the community has noticed. In May 2026, the American Council of the Blind announced a member benefit partnership with OneCourt. Its executive director, Scott Thornhill, put it this way: “It’s about experiencing the pulse of the game in real time.”

From a Class Project to the Super Bowl

What began in 2021 as a University of Washington class project is now on the biggest stages in sport. Over ten professional teams offer OneCourt at every home game, and the company reports more than eighty of its tablets in use. In the NBA alone, ten teams carried it this season. The Arizona Diamondbacks were the first Major League Baseball club to offer it. OneCourt has also run pilots at the FIFA Club World Cup and across the NFL.

And it has shown up where the entire sports world is watching. Partnering with Ticketmaster and the leagues, OneCourt has been present at Super Bowl LX, the NBA All-Star Game, and the MLB All-Star Game. Along the way it has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30, won the SXSW Pitch competition, placed at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, joined the NBA Launchpad, and been ranked among Sports Business Journal‘s top sports technology companies.

What It Costs, and Why That Matters

For me, the price may be the most impressive part of all. In a venue, OneCourt is free to fans. You arrive with a ticket, go to guest services, check out a device, and use it for the whole game.

At home, here’s what it runs:

• The device on its own is $369.
• The device with three months of service is $420.
• The device with a full year of service is $549.
• After any prepaid period, the All-Access subscription is $29.99 per month.

That All-Access subscription covers NBA, MLB, and NFL games with no blackouts. The data is tactile, not video, so the usual streaming restrictions simply do not apply. Three swappable overlays are included, and OneCourt is taking preorders now, with delivery estimated for December 2026.

Notice what is, and is not, required. The package is the tablet, a free app for iPhone or Android, and the subscription. You do not need a separate streaming plan. In plain terms, anyone with a smartphone can now feel the game at home.

Members of the American Council of the Blind can use the code ACB26 at checkout for one free month of All-Access, while supplies last.

The Publisher and the Engineer, Both Excited

I am incredibly happy to report that OneCourt has agreed to support the ongoing distribution of Top Tech Tidbits via Sponsorship. So not only has OneCourt completely changed the game (pun very much intended) for blind sports fans all over the world, they now make free weekly assistive technology news possible for more than 46,000 disabled readers, across the globe, as of this writing.

As an engineer who has been covering technology for more than 20 years now, I deeply admire the discipline of this design. The hardest problems were solved by refusing to solve them the hard way, by partnering for the data, by optimizing relentlessly for cost, by letting a small device carry an enormous load. As a publisher, I care about what it does for the people I serve. It hands a blind fan something that has been out of reach for far too long: the live game, felt in real time, shared with the crowd in the very same instant.

OneCourt’s stated mission is to make entertainment accessible by 2030. Its tagline is simple, and it happens to be exactly right: Sports Are For Everyone.

You can learn more, explore the at-home product, or preorder now. ACB members can find the member benefit here.

Cheers,

” The greatest barrier to accessibility is indifference. “

Aaron Di Blasi, PMP
Engineer, Educator, Advocate, Publisher & Journalist
President & Sr. PMP, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd., PR Director: AT-Newswire, Publisher: AI-Weekly, Top Tech Tidbits, Access Information News, Title II Today

Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd.
President, Sr. Project Management Professional (2006 — Present)
Innovative ideas. Solutions that perform.

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