Angela Pennyfeather, born and raised in Bed Stuy, has been going to Brooklyn Nets’ home openers for just about as long as the Nets have played in Brooklyn. But this year was different.

For the 2026-27 Nets’ season, the Barclays Center debuted a revolutionary AI-enhanced replay system that gives fans something totally new: a near-perfect 3D-recreation of the on-court action.

The tech was on display throughout the game to highlight dunks, blocks and steals. Replays were broadcast on the jumbotron and published across the team’s social-media channels. 

“It was pretty phenomenal,” Pennyfeather said. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Even her teenage son was impressed — “and he’s always trying to keep it cool,” she said. 

In the not-so-distant future, AI-powered replay systems will allow fans anywhere in the world to interact with the game from perspectives never before possible — say, directly under the hoop at a basketball game, or from inside the batter’s box at a baseball game — and edit their own replay packages. 

“One of our big goals is building the next generation of Brooklyn Nets fans,” Keia Cole, Chief Digital Officer of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment (BSE), the parent company that owns the Nets, told The Post. “This is a tool built to wow them.”

The Nets’ 360-degree replay system was created by a set of 64 cameras placed all around the arena near the suite level. Each records the game from its unique angle, then sends its data to the cloud, where an AI-model built by Alibaba sews the footage together. Nets owner Joe Tsai is the cofounder and chairman of Alibaba Group.

The process takes only 15 to 20 seconds.

And the final product — “it’s kind of like art,” Pennyfeather said. 

The Alibaba Group has shown off the technology before, including at the Milan-Cortina Olympics with set-ups around 17 sports.

“[Basketball] games move so quickly, it’s hard to understand the mechanics and the complexity of a move,” said Cole. “This is a nuanced way to slow down the game.” 

As of now, you can only see the 360-degree replay system on the arena’s jumbotron or via the Nets social-media channels, but a Toronto-based startup is working to bring similar views to every screen in America.

Peripheral was founded in 2024 by Kelvin Cui and Mustafa Khan, then 21 and 22 years old. The following year, their company was selected to be a part of the NBA’s incubator program, Launchpad. 

Their work in the incubator culminated in Las Vegas at the 2026 Summer League, where Peripheral unveiled their product to league executives.

“We were able to show off our full videos for the first time. The Raptors [shared] some clips that went viral on X, fans really liked it, and the NBA invested,” Cui said. “So, yeah, it was sick.”

Peripheral’s technology works largely the same way as Alibaba’s — but Peripheral’s model will allow viewers more freedom. With an Xbox controller, the operator can ‘fly’ to any point on the court or around the arena to see what a play looks like from that point of view. They can even lock into an individual player and replay the game from their perspective. 

Peripheral’s cameras capture not just the volumetric data of how the game is unfolding, but also biomechanical data of how players are moving — down to individual finger joints. 

Cui, who previously worked on self-driving cars at Tesla, sees applications well beyond broadcasts. Teams could use the technology to better understand their players’ physical tendencies and develop protocols to prevent injuries. Coaches could use it to show their team how a play unfolded from the other side of the court. The league could use it to help with officiating. 

“The goal is to have all of these applications out this season,” Cui said. 

And the technology is only getting better. Less than a year ago, Peripheral was working with a 32 camera set-up, but that number is now down to just 18. The AI-model is trained on real games, and the more it records, the faster, cleaner and more efficient it becomes. 

Peripheral is currently working with multiple NBA teams on permanent installations, though the company can’t yet say which ones. In the future, the company wants to get the controllers into fans’ hands so they can watch their favorite team in a video game-like environment.

“There’s a lot of creative opportunities here for people who are producing the game for [television] or on the jumbotron,” Cui said. “[But also], this is how we get younger audiences back into live sports — give them an interactive experience closer to what they’re used to in 2K.”