Hank Vogel, left, and his father Jon Vogel check out a OneCourt tactile device before a Portland Trail Blazers game on Feb. 22, 2025. The Portland Trail Blazers are the first professional sports team to offer this device at all of their home games.
Anna Lueck for OPB
It’s a rainy, February night when 11-year-old Hank Vogel gets to the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon. He’s there to watch the Portland Trail Blazers play the Charlotte Hornets and he’s got his dad, uncle and a friend from school in tow.
Before tip-off, they’ve got a few things to take care of: find their seats, get some snacks and check out a OneCourt device, something Hank will use during the game because he is blind.
“Blindness does not mean blackness, it just means I can’t see as well as other people,” he explained. “So I can see, it’s just fuzzy.”
Hank has aniridia which is a rare, degenerative eye disease that caused him to be born without irises. His father Jon Vogel said the mutation has also caused Hank to have other eye conditions like glaucoma.
“He’s been stable for 10 years, but it is a degenerative disease, so he’s learning braille, he uses a cane,” said Vogel. ”Because we don’t know what his vision will be.”
Hank also reads large print text, uses a monocular and when he’s at a basketball game there’s a brand new technology he can use from the Seattle tech company OneCourt.
Hank Vogel places his hands on a OneCourt tactile device during a Portland Trail Blazers game, Portland, Ore., Feb. 22, 2025. The device vibrates and offers audio narration so users like Vogel, who is blind, can experience the game in real time.
Anna Lueck for OPB
“We’ve essentially developed a laptop-sized haptic display that’s capable of communicating dynamic information like sporting events through touch,” said Jerred Mace, the CEO and founder of OneCourt.
The technology uses data that’s already being collected by the NBA through cameras installed in the catwalks of each arena that track the movements of the ball and every player on the court at 25 frames per second.
“So you can think of it like a normal screen, but instead of visual pixels, they’re tactile,” said Mace. “You can feel the motion of the player with the ball moving around the court in real time.”
The device looks like a thicker, oversized iPad with a removable rubber mat that sits on top. The mat has a raised outline of the court or playing field, and can be swapped out depending on which sport you’re watching.
Mace said users track all the action via vibrations, “When you have your hands as flat as possible and are using your entire hand, it’s kind of like being ‘zoomed out’: you get a great sense of the location generally as they move around the court. But then you can use your fingertips to ‘zoom in’ and really pick out some of those finer details.”
Hank Vogel, age 11, uses a OneCourt tactile device during a Portland Trail Blazers game.
Anna Lueck for OPB
The OneCourt also has a companion audio feed that gives basic updates. After a Blazers shot from the three-point line early in the first quarter, the crowd exploded and Hank explained what was happening for him, “It said in my headphones a score — ‘Blazers three points’ — and it was really cool cause I could feel it.”
Technology like this could be a game changer, said Dr. Alan Labrum, a low-vision optometrist at Oregon Health & Science University’s Casey Eye Institute.
“Patients with low vision, especially children, the studies show that they tend to participate less in social activities and they tend to have lower quality of life scores,” he said.
Labrum said this kind of tech gives patients access to something doctors usually can’t: fun.
“In my clinic, I focus on daily tasks like how to help someone meet their educational goals or their work goal activities of daily living,” he said. “And so I think it’s awesome to find ways to improve accessibility to just having fun.”
Hank Vogel shows friend Flynn Knox how to use the OneCourt device. The technology uses real-time data to translate the game into haptic vibrations for sports fans who are blind or low-vision.
Crystal Ligori / OPB
This season, the Portland Trail Blazers became the first NBA team to make it available for games. Through a partnership with Ticketmaster, five OneCourt devices are available for the rest of the Blazers’ season. Fans can check them out free of charge at any home game, said Matthew Gardner, senior director of customer insights with the Trail Blazers.
“Three of them we have on a reservable basis, so you can reach out to our Guest Experience team to set one aside if you’re coming to the arena,” he said. “And then we keep two on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.”
Right now, you can’t buy a OneCourt for personal use, but founder Jerred Mace says that is the ultimate goal.
“Fans have been telling us from the beginning that this isn’t just something that is useful in a stadium, like ‘I’m watching sports at home all the time and I want to listen alongside my friends and family, or I want to watch at the bar,‘” said Mace. “So we’re doing our best to stay focused and achieve initial scale within the stadium markets, but we will get to that at-home model.”
And as they expand, one element they are focused on is the price, hoping to keep the cost of a OneCourt around the range of a cell phone or a gaming console.
Hank Vogel said his experience going to Blazers games before the OneCourt was underwhelming.
“It was just boring,” he said. “I would just sit there and then I also felt like I was missing out on a lot because everybody [was] standing up and cheering and I’d be like ‘I really wish I knew what was going on’.”
Now with this new technology, he does.
From left, Jon Vogel, son Hank Vogel, and Hank's friend Flynn Knox clap and cheer during a Portland Trail Blazers game in Portland, Ore., Feb. 22, 2025. Hank, who is blind, says that, before the Trail Blazers offered the OneCourt tactile device, these games were "boring" for him, because he often didn't know what was going on.
Anna Lueck for OPB
Tags: Trail Blazers, Culture, Blind, Technology, Sports
Stand with OPB and protect independent journalism for everyone.
Streaming Now
Weekend Edition Sunday with Ayesha Rascoe
