How AI and AR is changing the landscape of sports broadcasting?
In today’s advanced technology era, AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are seamlessly integrated in various businesses and our daily life. We are using many such tools on our smartphones, web browsers, various apps whose backend is driven by these technologies. Various filters, inside apps of your social media platforms and android / iOS are one of the best examples of it.
Sports arena is also using it on an immense level. We are witnessing realtime insertion of 3D graphics, interactive placement of related objects, various data driven charts and many more in live broadcasting. The difference is hardly in the range of 5-10 seconds delay.
Case study of Rafael Nadal and David Ferrer’s tournament:
Rafael Nadal, world renowned Spanish super star tennis player, has opened the Rafa Nadal Academy in Kuwait. To make it on a grand level, Nadal did tournament with David Ferrer. More than 1500 people saw it live and the same was broadcasted by Kuwait Sport TV, for the entire world to see it from their home. By this time, Brainstorm and Mena joined hands to provide AR content and graphics, for the live broadcasting of its opening act.
Brainstorm 3D’s leading software products – Aston, InfinitySet, OnDemand were used in the backend.
- Aston: Creation and manipulation of video templates
- InfinitySet: Creation of the virtual set of tennis tournament, inserting AR (Augmented Reality) scenes
- OnDemand: The on-air engine for broadcasting of real shooting and AR data together, Tool for live production, to manage all graphics and texts
The combination of above mentioned tools were used for all animations, realtime tracking as per various camera positions and movements, insertion of 3D objects and texts in Augmented Reality scenes. The technical team created an entire virtual set of the live event. Such system gave them flexibility and ease to integration it with AR elements and to broadcast. The other software products used for graphics creations was Photoshop, 3ds Max and Unreal Engine.
The live broadcast of Rafael Nadal and David Ferrer’s tournament, including all AR graphics was great success. It was glitch free broadcasting. All thanks to powerful and robust softwares of Brainstorm. This mammoth task was carried out by Mena, a very well known Sports Services Provider and system integrator from Egypt and Kuwait.
Check out the image gallery consisting AR integration into live tournament.
