Our world is undergoing
profound change.
Science and technology are transforming our lives
with dizzying speed.
Astonishing innovations are ushering in
a new era of opportunity.
The high tech revolution is fueling creativity
around the globe inspiring visionary solutions.
So open your eyes and get ready for an amazing
journey to 2050 to dream the future.
(upbeat music)
(techno music)
In the 21st century, sport is king.
It embodies the human spirit, strength,
endurance, courage.
(crowd cheering)
(whistle blowing)
It captivates millions of spectators
around the world.
What matters is the emotion that athletes convey,
not their nationality.
Brotherhood between people is the most beautiful
thing in sports.
(gun shot)
We will ourselves to go stronger,
faster, higher.
Sportsmen are just looking for, for adrenaline,
for passion and they are looking
to push themselves and do something different
and to have big adrenaline effect.
Will we push the boundaries of
human performance even further?
As a human race, we're pushing ourselves
to become better and better and better,
but there, there will be a limit.
We will hit that limit.
Will we join with machines
to achieve even more?
Better than he was before.
Better, stronger, faster.
(sportscaster narrating game)
Will competition become a matter
of life and death?
(sportscaster narrating game)
There can be special technology
to make people feel free, doing special kind of
activity, it can make them very fast.
It can allow them to fly.
It can be very entertaining and amusing,
and it can be a big adventure.
So, what will sport look like in 2050?
To find out, meet the visionaries who are thinking,
inventing, building, and dreaming the future of sport.
As a player I always wondered if there was a better way
to be studying, to be preparing.
But now with technology we can work on some stuff
mentally, so you can do that visually much quicker
than lining everybody up and doing it.
And with our current physiology and evolutionary state,
human is rate, but I wanted to take it to the next level.
(planes whooshing)
What's great about this wing is strapped to your back,
is that it's following you.
It's totally intuitive.
You're like a kid pretending to be a plane,
except it works and you're flying.
Throughout human history,
sports have played a vital role.
Two million years ago, our ancestors
were already running fast to escape predators.
A hundred thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon worked
on his hunting.
Man competed as seen in wresting scenes
carved on reliefs in Mesopotamia.
Gradually the warrior became a player,
shooting, jumping, or running for fun.
Athletic feats were celebrated in Greece.
The first Olympic champion was worshiped
as a Demigod.
Sports entertained the elite.
Sumo wrestling matches took place in the Japanese
Imperial Court.
And knights jousted before royalty.
Disciplines were invented from the complex to the comical.
A series of popular ball games finally led to soccer
in the 19th century.
Sports entered an era of global competition
when the Olympic games were revived and modernized
in 1896, athletes became global figures,
symbols of their country.
The goal was no longer just winning,
but leaving a lasting mark.
Sports left the confines of the stadium
to conquer the world.
Today, many millions enjoy the pleasure of the game.
Sports have a huge influence on our health and happiness.
Could it possibly be any other way in the future?
Sports will remain the same in the future
because they're part of the human spirit.
But just as technology will change our lives,
so too will sports be more and more influenced by it.
Future athletes will have a new toolkit.
Today, big data is used to turn every minute
of our lives into digital information.
Heart rate, blood pressure, number of strides or strokes,
how will we exploit all this data?
I think there is a lot of data being collected
that could be useful.
If we could start to make those measurements
bio mechanically and say this is what works
and then train that way, we're a little bit more efficient
in our training.
You don't have to necessarily go through the
school of hard knocks then to get the results in the end.
Will the future miraculously hand
us the thrill of victory?
That's the promise of connected objects.
Strapped to our wrists, arms, or legs,
they analyze our every move to help us
achieve peak performance.
At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,
engineers design tools that enable athletes
to improve their performance.
I'm less interested in the result
than in the actions taken to achieve it.
Another 15 seconds, come on, you're almost done.
Here at the Health and Sports Center,
we focus on the individual.
We use all the characteristics and data
we can gather in terms of mechanics and physiology
in order to provide individual solutions
for training and monitoring progress.
At the top you can see the result of the imbalance,
with a stability index of 0%.
In other words, the imbalance was such
that your pelvis wasn't able to regulate it
at the psycho-motor level.
When I look at the way people move,
we realize there's a lot of compensatory
or unintentional gestures.
Movement isn't as natural as before.
There's less instinct, more stiffness and tension.
What's interesting now is to analyze behaviors
with respect to certain values.
For instance, the center of mass trajectory,
stability indexes,
anything that shows us how people manage their bodies.
The goal is to teach them to make better use
of their energy, of the mechanics of their body.
And to take on more efficient gestures.
When you're walking with shoes on,
you have little, if any feeling in your feet
and you're not even aware of it.
But when you see how Massi runs, you'll ask yourself
why on earth would they wear shoes?
Exactly, your core is firm, your arms are coordinated.
Very good nice increase in dynamics.
These days we're working mainly with our heads,
and less with our bodies.
So people need numbers, diagrams, and analysis
to better understand and maybe reclaim movement.
If today we can use this data in a playful manner
or with a certain methodology,
to teach kids and adults alike how to use their bodies
again, that's a good thing.
Watching great athletes at work made me ask myself
a lot of questions.
Maradona, Ronaldinho, Bode Miller, the way they
take ownership of eeach movement, their signature moves,
their way of being, their behavior in terms of
movement quality, I wondered if that could be recreated
for the average Joe, the amateur athlete
or the sportsman who wants to get better.
In the future, this woman
and this man or that one could all be at the starting
line of the same race.
Maybe someday they'll compete against the best in the world.
And experience what top athletes feel.
When we look at the past Olympics,
there were over a hundred Olympic records
that were broken and I think like 37 world records
that were broken at the last Olympics.
And so when you look at those numbers, you're like
okay, when is this gonna end?
When do we get to the point where
the person on top cannot be improved upon,
that time, that performance?
As a human race we're pushing ourselves
in sports to become better and better and better,
but there will be, there will be a limit.
We will hit that limit.
Without records, there would be no emotion,
and no spectators.
Will stadiums one day become monuments
like the Colosseum?
Shrines to former glories?
To make sure the show does go on,
will we resort to more and more sophisticated
forms of doping?
Advances in biotechnology could change everything.
It may become possible to manipulate the muscle
structure, or lung capacity of each athlete.
It's a pipe dream to think that you can fiddle
with nano technology in genomes.
As of today, we do not grasp the complexity
of the human genome.
Not by a long shot.
Science is much more complex than that
and this is only the beginning of the story.
Have we reached the end of evolution?
Do our physical bodies no longer match our ambitions?
What if we could create an augmented man?
A six million dollar man?
Steve Austin, astronaut.
A man barely alive.
Better than he was before.
Better, stronger, faster.
(fast music)
Medicine can already have a huge effect
on the human body.
For now, we only use it when patients are sick.
But we can imagine that someday
these modifications might be used
to improve someone's performance.
We'll have to see where it goes.
I doubt people will have their legs cut off
in order to have a prosthesis like Pistorius
to run faster.
But it's hard to imagine what the limits are.
We'll have to ask ourselves questions.
Not only from a performance perspective,
but also from an ethical and philosophical point of view.
Where should we stop?
Fitting ourselves with external armor
an exoskeleton could soon become a reality.
That's the dream of this passionate inventor
in San Francisco.
And with our current physiology
and evolutionary state, human is great,
but I wanted to take it to the next level.
My name is Keahi Seymour.
The aim for the future is to run faster
than the fastest land animal on Earth, the cheetah.
I was always intrigued by speed
and the fastest man on Earth and how
a human was able to run, almost under 10
seconds, 400 meters.
But I always wanted to further that
in terms of combining technology to see
how fast a human could run.
That's why I can call myself half geek,
half sportsman.
I won't say I'm a top athlete,
but it'd be great to get at 25 miles an hour.
I remember the day when I actually drew the first prototype
for the bionic boots, watched a natural history
program on kangaroos.
The announcer was saying how the kangaroo
stores energy in their achilles tendons.
I just instantly related that to a human's legs.
I know we have achilles tendons ourselves,
and I wondered if I could make almost an artificial leg
that would enable myself to run like an animal.
And then progressive prototypes,
I realized that the fashion of running
like an ostrich is more applicable to a human being.
So then I started to look at an ostrich physiology
and mechanics and then after that
made the first prototype and strapped it to my legs
and started to run like an ostrich.
(laughing)
The simplicity is a key with the boot itself.
You don't need to rely on a battery supply
or petro gasoline, a fuel supply.
It's a kinetic to potential energy storage.
People don't realize the forces involved in running
is very high, almost like five to seven times
your body weight.
♪ Yo, I know a lot of yo wouldn't expect it ♪
♪ Hard now seeing as it's bein' lookin' real hectic ♪
♪ I been elected so yo best sit on your ass girlfriend ♪
♪ Because I'm trucking like electric ♪
As I'm a sole inventor, designer, maker,
I work on this in my workshop on my own.
I don't have high technology, for example,
CNC laser welding materials, even CAD,
having raw materials.
I am cutting it by hand with a hacksaw,
a drill, and a angle grinder,
and those are the three tools I've used to make
every single piece on the boot by myself
by hand every single piece.
This is how we do it, at the bionic lair.
It's not just extreme sports
enthusiasts who are intrigued.
In nearby Silicone Valley, engineers are also
designing exoskeletons.
Hi.
How are you, good to see you.
Good to see you again.
How are you?
I'm good, how are you?
Bionic boots, which require
neither energy nor electronics
could transform health and fitness.
Now you've actually run how fast in these already?
So I topped out at 25 miles an hour.
Definitely faster than you can run without
these boots, is that true?
That's correct, yeah.
If not that would be really weird.
(laughter)
Exactly.
What we're developing here
is the muscles and ligaments and tendons
that go externally on the body.
And we use the inside structure, so the endoskeleton
in the human as the compressive elements.
So we're doing something that's very lightweight,
almost like Spiderman, kind of, that's the kind
of super suit we're developing.
The issues that we're having today
with creating these suits or augmentation outfits
is you need to be able to tune every suit
or every augmentation to the person.
If you look at the body and you look at the human gait,
everybody has a kind of a different DNA
or a different, we're like little different snowflakes.
In the future, these suits will be worn by everybody.
I almost have to educate the public.
It's a little difficult all doing this by myself,
but you know, as I assimilated to the birthplace
of the California, the origins of the skateboard,
fiberglass surfboard, and the origins of the mountain
bike here in Mount Tamalpais Marine County,
it, the public soon got on and as soon as they're able
to try these products for the first time
and felt the new sensation of speed
and the adrenaline rush, then it'll gain popularity
and everyone will want to try a pair.
It's taken me almost two decades
to reach where I am right now
in terms of a aesthetically good looking product,
something that also works well, too.
The only person that believed in me
all these years was my mum and she wrote me,
writes, gives me nice cards and letters
stay, not to, not to stop believing.
I'm trying to form a different path in terms of
finding a new sport, something fun out there.
Maybe in 40 years time, everyone's gonna be
running around on bionic boots.
Probably we are going to use that
for a different sport.
We could use that on extreme sport.
I was already thinking to put that
with roller blade on it like that,
you can make bigger jump or you maybe
can do that for soccer game, or you will have bigger,
bigger jumps, maybe faster, so we can combine
technology to invent almost new sport.
When it comes to inventing new sports,
human imagination seems infinite.
Slack lining, mixing boxing with chess.
Playing soccer in space.
And even jumping from the stratosphere.
(astronaut mumbling)
We really have a knack for turning everything
into a game.
Science fiction writers have a much darker view.
Future sports are depicted as savage duels
and death is just part of the show.
(sportscaster narrating game)
People are looking for more and more extreme
and it's pushing, of course, the sportsmen
and the sponsors are also going on that way
because the sponsors, they want communication,
they want promotion, so they are pushing
the sportsmen to say, take more risk.
In a way it's cool for the public
because they see every time something more crazy,
but for the sportsmen is quite dangerous.
The will to achieve more,
to respect one's self and one's opponent,
are these values doomed to disappear?
To rediscover the essence of the game,
a former football player and a team of developers
have resorted to virtual reality.
My name is Nate Longshore
and I train quarterbacks in southern California,
and my dream for the future would be
that in sport, you are able to compete
using virtual reality.
The back on the Mike linebacker, look
at that separation that he gets, right?
He's dropping back, safety's goin' there,
I'm coming right here.
Nice, very good.
Felt his catch.
Very good.
You see how quick he gets the ball out to the flat there,
just like we worked out on the field,
we're gonna make that read and if our eyes
go to number one and number one's open,
we're gonna take it, just like he did there,
go ahead to the next play.
As a player I always wondered
if there was a better way to be studied,
to be preparing.
I always felt that there had to be a more
productive use of our time going through
game plan and strategy.
It wasn't very efficient, but now with technology
we can work on some stuff mentally, so you can do that
visually much quicker than lining everybody up
and doing it, so we have sport,
which is becoming more mental.
Working my zonery, coming here, Flat's open.
Good, very good.
My gut instinct tells me if you do something mentally
enough times and have that ingrained in your head
you're gonna be physically more capable of
recreating that same action and that same
safety precaution when it comes time to physically do it.
One, two, three, four five, reset.
Good.
You're up Henry.
You're throwing.
You scared him.
Injuries slowed my career, both legs, torn bicep,
injured shoulder, all those things add up
and accumulate over time and had that,
one of those feelings of if only this was available
when I was a player.
(screaming)
Henry, you want a piece of that?
First started playing in high school.
We'd practice from 2:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.,
six hours, just because there was that much
to work on, but now they only practice for two hours.
So 10 years of evolution, we've cut the physical
practice demand down significantly, 60%.
It's not that the game doesn't require as much,
but there's just, there's new tools to expedite
that process.
All right, you have these virtual environments
that you can travel through and it requires
you to not just use your hands to control.
You have to physically move through these virtual worlds.
For me I'm typically six foot five and my eyes
are typically six feet and two inches off the ground
at all times, so I have a very routine perspective
in my body and my brain is very used to that,
so the first time you introduce this virtual reality,
it's not quite the same perspective.
Availability to experience your opponent
prior to the game is, is now available
and it's a significant advantage knowing that you've
practiced against what they're gonna do already.
From the moment technology becomes an integral
part of sport, we'll discover new abilities in athletes.
Currently a soccer player can only use his senses
to assess the tactical situation.
But one day, information will be available
to him in real time, thanks to a computer or a group
of sensors.
It won't be displayed on a Google Glass
as now, but directly in the eye of the athlete,
or he'll have a processor connected to a radio transmitter
in order to communicate with the outside world.
This means a change in perspective
for both players and coaches, whose instructions
would appear directly in the eye of the players.
Will players need a new sixth sense to process
this type of information?
(whistle blowing)
It may be the task of managing information
in real time won't be assigned to the players
on the field.
It could be handed over to a special team
which will transmit the main intention
and the probabilities.
The players can then react in real time
because the opposing team is forcing them to change
their game plan.
The question is on a neuronal level,
just how efficiently can we understand
and make sense of all the information we received?
Forget big muscles and washboard abs.
Introducing the athlete of the future.
The gamer, able to morph at will to compete
with the greatest champions.
For a long time, video games
were dominated by nerdy outcasts.
Rebranded eSports, they've become a social phenomenon.
There are hundreds of millions of players
around the world and the best compete in huge stadiums.
But is this really a sport?
Gamers, sorry, eAthletes have the reflexes
of a tennis champion and the vision of a fighter pilot.
Their supporters are passionate.
The games are broadcast on YouTube and get hundreds
of millions of views.
So why not imagine a future where all competitions
take place in a virtual world?
I think it's already the case today.
Young people are spending increasingly more time
in arcades than on running tracks.
But will it completely replace physical exercise?
Probably not.
I like sport the way it is.
But the interaction between real athletes
and their virtual avatars will certainly
be increasingly important.
Whether in real life or virtual reality,
athletes are always looking for the same thing.
The thrill of pushing their own boundaries.
At the end, sportsmen are just looking for
adrenaline, for passion, and they are looking
to push themself and to do something different
and to have big adrenaline effect.
The production of hormones, especially adrenaline
induces extremely powerful risk taking
under conditions which the human body is not
designed to survive.
Difficulty and danger
are magnets for extreme sports fanatics.
One of them found a new playground in Dubai
between sand dunes and sky scrapers.
(hip hop music)
I'm the missing link, so to speak,
between men and birds.
I'm a flying man, a man with a wing strapped
to his back.
(calming music)
The idea for this project
came to me quite a long time ago.
I was 30 years old, a professional fighter pilot,
and airline pilot.
I discovered free fall pretty late.
It was pure free flight.
But it was short, 45 seconds, maybe one minute later,
you had to open your parachute.
It was already over.
So with my background and expertise in aviation
and other sports,
I thought it would be great to make that sense
of freedom last longer.
Loud and clear, is all good?
Loud and clear, perfect.
Great.
The way the wing works is pretty simple.
We realized, by studying birds, that the wing
curvature creates an area of lower pressure.
It's the difference between the higher pressure
below the wing and the low pressure above it
that produces lift.
I had my team calculate how much thrust
I would need to stay in the air while gliding.
We gradually started adding jet engines, four in all.
We changed the aerodynamics and now we're doing loops
around the clouds.
I'm using high tech materials, like carbon and Kevlar.
I check the aerodynamics inside a wind tunnel.
And through this, I have to stay fit.
Because I'm using my own body to steer.
There can't be any break down on my part.
It really is a full fledged sport.
I have to deliver both physically and mentally
just like an athlete.
While I'm getting ready to fly,
there's a period of concentration
during which, all of a sudden, I start focusing
on what's going to happen.
There's a kind of positive tension,
and an adrenaline rush, because you're getting
ready for action.
What's great about this wing strapped to your back
is that it's following you.
It's totally intuitive.
You're like a kid pretending to be a plane.
Except it works, and you're flying, and that's just great.
We've come up against a wall.
Not just jetmen, but everyone.
I'm talking about fuel.
Right now we're mainly using fossil fuel,
whether nuclear power or oil.
There's still a bit left, but someday,
it'll all be over.
We'll have to find something else
if we want to keep having fun.
We should stop polluting as well while we're at it.
To what extent will the environment force us to adapt?
We don't know what will still be available energy wise.
God knows both extreme and high level athletes
consume huge amounts of energy.
Infrastructure, logistics, transportation,
sporting events have a real impact on the environment.
The 2012 London Olympics emitted three million tons
of carbon dioxide, what 200,000 Americans emit
in a year.
In the future, will sports be limited
to satisfying thrill seekers?
Or will we experience some kind of awakening?
There can be special technology,
which can be used for athletes or for anybody,
producing a lot of autonomy.
And I could imagine that there's some new sports
disciplines, which will be developed out of
such kind of novel technologies.
Each year, a rather peculiar race
takes places in Australia.
1800 miles through the Tanami Desert,
using only solar powered cars.
It's a race in both technical and physical aspects,
so you're racing in a technical aspect
to build up the most efficient car within
the two year cycle that you have, and you're also
running to get to the end of the line first.
My name's Daniel Eddington, I'm one of the drivers
and an electrical engineer on Western Sydney University's
solar car project team.
In some ways you feel like a pioneer.
It's quite exciting because you're not using any
petrol, you can just drive in the bright sun,
so that's, you can just go for kilometers and kilometers
without having to plug in or go to a fuel station or
anything like that, so what we do now
will be built upon and make more exciting
in the future, so it's quite exciting being
on the cusp of the cutting edge of the sport
of this kind.
But the big challenge in developing a car like this
is that you have a limited resource of light.
So you only have a certain amount of light
that you can work with.
And from that amount of light you can only
draw so much power from it, so in developing
a car like this, you have to concentrate on efficiency
from the aero dynamics from being light weight,
the efficiency of the electronics, the rolling
resistance of the tires,
the barrings that we use.
Everything we do is to make sure that we have
the best efficiency possible for driving
the car in a straight line down the road.
As an engineer, it's quite exciting
because we're doing some cutting edge
development in solar technology and electric vehicles.
And then on the other hand as a, as a competitor
and as a racer, it's exciting for me as well,
because not only is designing and building the car,
it's also running the car.
(upbeat music)
Driving the car is quite a brilliant sensation,
actually, it's not quite like driving a road car.
You don't get all, you feel different noises
and vibrations and things like that
and it's really, you really feel the adrenaline
when you're driving, especially on the hot lap.
The threat of a crash or something thrilling
happening is always about to happen.
In this race there's, you're always on the edge
of something, something possibly happening
so on the track you don't want to push too hard.
You might go too fast and put it into a gravel pit
or you might crash into a wall.
Driving those technologies forward,
whilst it may seem slightly unattainable right now
and a bit weird in the sense that
we're not being as a whole sport,
as renewable as we could be,
we are pushing forward a technology for
making things better for the future,
so driving forward those kind of future technologies
is a key part to this kind of competition.
One things for sure.
In 2050, sports will be packed with technology.
What if athletes had to compete against a new kind
of opponent?
Unshakeable, inflexible, and maybe even invincible?
(dramatic music)
When you challenge yourself,
you just want to challenge yourself with your own
fears, your own dreams, and if you make that
after you challenge yourself with other people,
I don't think I have a problem if I get beat
by a robot, but it's going to be weird, very weird
if I have to really do a challenge with a robot,
that's going to be very weird sensation.
In France, engineers are developing
a team of robots to compete against the world's top
flesh and blood soccer players.
Our robots are prototypes.
They're absolutely not mass produced objects.
I see it much more like craftsmanship in the sense
that they have certain versatility.
Did you see that?
I just adjusted it a bit.
Soccer is a very interesting challenge.
Because it implies a lot of obstacles,
falling, picking oneself up, getting into position,
kicking the ball, avoiding the opponent,
playing as a team, we're very interested in solving
those problems.
A robot has many advantages.
First of all, in theory, it's faster than us
in terms of reflexes.
The computer system that's inside a robot
does billions of calculations per second.
In the end, a robot has much more efficient reflexes.
But what messy does, isn't a reflex,
which could be done better or faster.
His behavior is the result of
true sensory motor intelligence.
There's a strategy for each movement.
A quality of execution, a kind of motor symphony
inside the head of a champion
that we can't even imagine.
A robot needs an algorithm to describe
its movements.
Despite all the precise and quantified
knowledge of physics that we have,
we still need to find a model to describe
movements which could then be expressed
as an equation.
If we don't have a clear mathematical model
that reflects reality, then we can't recreate it.
It keeps me up at night.
Each year, scientists and engineers
gather at the Robot Soccer World Cup.
(whistle blowing)
Behind its friendly atmosphere,
this is a human and technological battle.
Everything comes to life during the match.
Because we're cheering it on,
we're watching its every move.
Hoping that it will do this and notice that.
We're feeling the same excitement
an athlete would feel after training
a whole year to compete.
We're giving it all we have.
(cheering)
In the future, there will be more and more
robot competitions.
People will support labs the way they're supporting
racing teams.
Perhaps by means of prototypes that will
become emblematic.
That would be awesome.
Yes, I definitely would go see a robot game.
In 2050 robots might be able to defeat us,
and not just in one sport.
Because that's easy.
Scientists are already able to build robots
that can run faster than us.
But we can't imagine that one day
robots will be able to defeat a pentathlon
champion in all five disciplines.
They'll be capable of running, swimming,
even though they're made of metal.
Riding a horse, jumping, and so on.
It's a very big scientific challenge.
Man is unique.
Whether from an intellectual or physical point of view.
No other species has the same level of versatility
and robots will have a hard time recreating it.
Even though humans have limits,
nothing else can surpass us for now.
Across the ages,
sports have always evolved and adapted.
They act as a mirror to society.
Tomorrow will bring exciting new forms
of competition, but what will the values and limits be?
In the future, the dream will endure.
To go higher, stronger, faster.
(dramatic music)