Do you think that to play better basketball, you have practice basketball? Not so, states Ace Applied Cognitive Engineering's brochure. Ace is developing “a simulator for improving cognitive skills of basketball players."
Ace cofounder and CEO Danny Dankner says there was a moment when he realized that he wasn’t selling a simulator, he was selling victory.
”Globes”: Why run basketball game simulations? This isn’t like flight, where each sortie costs money and it's better to make dry runs.
Dankner: “Flight was the first area which used machines like ours. Until the 1990s, simulators tried to be as much like actual flying as possible. But it was discovered that there was a difference, even slight, between the training context and the real mission context. Not only wasn’t performance enhanced, it deteriorated.
“Then Prof. Daniel Gopher of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, who is now our research supervisor, had an idea. He thought it might be possible to break down flying skills into discrete sub-skills, and to train on each sub-skill outside the connection with flying. When the pilot returns to the plane, he will be better at paying attention, initiating and halting actions, and making decisions under pressure. He will be a better pilot.”
The flight simulator Gopher developed, like Ace's basketball simulator, has no flight and no basketball. Ace's basketball simulator is reminiscent of the spaceship video games of the 1980s. Each spaceship is different and the player must figure out when they are operating in isolation as a group (figuring out the opponent’s game), decide which opponent to deal with first (decision-making under pressure), shoot while in motion (correlation), and so on. “The full list of skills and tasks and the ways to practice each of them is confidential. It’s the core of our intellectual property,” says Dankner.
"This kind of formalization can be done for almost any task, from sports, through driving and the like, to even business negotiation. We decided to start with sports, because it's highly measurable. Better performance immediately translates into more victories, which immediately translates into more money for the team, especially overseas, where the professional sports market has a turnover of $200 billion a year. We applied for patents for each of the simulator's concept that is not a natural environment. The patent application is now in the search stage, while official approval is pending."
Did you choose basketball for a particular reason?
"We saw that basketball players love computer games."
Do they enjoy the game, in addition to the fact that it improves their performance?
"Training constantly involves situations that require cognitive effort, in a process that constantly gets harder. So obviously players leave exhausted, but we also want them to enjoy the game. Besides, he knows that with training, he'll be worth more."
Reach the end and stop
UI Human Factors Ltd. managing directors Dr. Ya'akov Greenshpan and Gil Hupert-Graff were both Gopher's students at the Technion when they decided to apply the research they conducted under Gopher to commercial use. Danny Dankner (who has no business relationship with, and only distant family ties to the famous Dankner family) was a cofounder of Kinetica, which was sold to NetVision. He subsequently studied law and clerked for Judge Orr, before quitting the profession to return to entrepreneurship. The company they founded, Ace Applied Cognitive Engineering, received $430,000 in financing from Netanya-based Targetech Innovation Center, which is supported by the Office of the Chief Scientist and Starvest Partners.
Is your game intended for the professional market, i.e. NBA players, or for children?
"The American sports market operates under the most basic segment rules. The elite is the NBA, with 30 large teams that set the tone for the entire market. Below them is the NCAA, with 3,000 university and college teams, which is also divided into three levels. At the bottom of the market is 35,000 high school teams and ten million individuals who say they play basketball at least once a week.
"The most lucrative market is, of course, the ten million end users. But for this market to realize that this is real training and not a toy, we need professional endorsement.
"When we first entered this market, we contacted sports commentator Ofer Shelah, who knows this world very well. He told us not to approach the NBA directly, because all the players and coaches are prima donnas. So we began with the NCAA Division I Conference.
"We hired four sales reps who set up meetings the top coaches. It wasn’t easy to meet them, because they're big celebrities in their field. But we reached them, and we had meanwhile sold to simulators to two teams, the University of Kentucky and the University of Memphis, for $10,000 to train the teams for a season. We also installed four simulators with independent players. We believe that when the NBA sees the product in action, they'll want it too."
How do you avoid stepping on a coach's toes, since he is the one who makes procurement decisions for the team?
"We're far from replacing the coach. We don’t teach basketball. We tend to imagine ourselves as a library. The coach teaches you the moves and techniques that are part of your library, and we only teach you how to use the library, pull out the right technique and perform it quickly and skillfully."
Will you sell the same product to the NBA that you sell to amateur players?
"The software is basically the same software, but the package we sell can cost between $150 and $80,000. Each package will be sold as a course. In other words, you can take three training sessions that gradually become more difficult, after which the disk no longer works and you have to buy a more advanced course. The $80,000 package provides many more training sessions, which can be repeated. It can also produce and analyze progress reports, and automatically adapt the software to the user's needs."
You said the software stops working when the training ends.
"At the low-end prices - yes. It's a course with a beginning and an end."
But today's hacking technologies your defenses will almost certainly be breached immediately, not to mention copying disks and distributing the information through the Internet.
"Each disk is linked to our server, which collects information on all the players in order to upgrade the program. It won't be possible to use the disk without connecting to the server, which will monitor the computer using the disk and prevent repeated training sessions without additional payment."
That will probably be very frustrating for children expecting one type of game, but suddenly discover that they can't play any more.
"Although we're seeking a distributor from the computer games industry, because we have a similar product, we have no intention of creating expectations that the product is a computer game. It's a course.
"We're not selling a game, but a result. Our brochures says, 'Win more games. Guaranteed.' If you don’t win more, you'll get your money back."
But if the two teams you've trained play against each other, they can't both win.
"We'll be happy to cross that bridge when we get to it. In such a utopia, no team can allow itself not to have the simulator. It's like a gym. Everyone trains to reach the same point, but gyms make very good money out of it."
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on November 4, 2004