SVG Europe
article here
World Athletics is accelerating its push to modernise the
presentation of athletics, introducing a series of broadcast‑focused
innovations designed to make the sport more accessible, data‑rich and engaging
for global audiences. Central to this effort is a new near‑realtime performance
visualisation system for sprint races, developed in partnership with Sony and
host broadcaster HBS.
It had its world debut at the
National Athletics Centre, Budapest, 11-13 September during the
inaugural WA Ultimate Championship. SVG Europe were given an exclusive
tour.
Enhancing the Finish‑Line Moment
For World Athletics, the sprint finish remains one of the
sport’s most compelling but least explored storytelling opportunities. Chief
Information Officer An Dang Duy, who oversees competition‑results technology
and data systems, said the brief to Sony was rooted in this challenge.
“Athletics is all about pure performance…yet the way we
experience it hasn’t evolved much for a long time,” he said. While athlete
tracking and race analysis have improved, the federation wanted to go further.
“We wanted to use technology for what we call broadcast augmentation — how can
we use technology for storytelling?”
The blue riband event of any athletics meet is the 100
metres. It’s the star of the show but barely lasts 10‑seconds while the finish occurs
in fractions of a second. Traditional broadcast tools offer limited ways to
unpack what happened. “Everyone knows the feel of the finish, but it’s very
difficult sometimes to appreciate how the first athletes cross the line. We
felt there was more to explore around that.”
The solution is the Virtual Finish Line (VFL) — a near‑realtime
3D reconstruction of the final metres of a sprint, generated from optical‑tracking
data.
The Photo
Finish remains the official tool to decide race outcome, officiated by IAAF
judges, and captured by high speed cameras taking thousands of frames per
second, but it’s not meant for a broadcast experience.
“What we are doing is extending the photo finish for fans.
Sprint races are something fans enjoy a lot so we wanted to build more stories
around that. You see the finish in slow motion or with views no one has
experienced before. It’s a new way of showing it. This is limited only by our
ideas, because the data is all there.”
The need for speed
One of the key requirements was speed. The VFL output needed
to be available quickly enough to be used like a replay.
Dang Duy added: “If it takes one hour, it’s not good for
us.” The goal was to make the VFL usable during celebrations, analysis segments
and for immediate post‑race storytelling with a variety of angles and clips
served up to the broadcast director like an EVS.
“So we pushed Sony, and they’ve done a great job reducing
the processing to less than one minute. That means the rendering can come in
the same fashion as slow motion, so it can be embedded into the story.”
Dang Duy distinguishes the system from the on-screen
presentation derived from 360-degree camera arrays by OBS to convey Olympic
sports like BMX. “It’s not video shot differently — we are using cameras to
collect data. We are turning data into video. Thanks to that data, you can
recreate anything you want.
“You might have seen other sports trying to recreate views —
that’s just video with some implementation. Here, we are working with raw data.
The concept is quite different from video‑based approaches.
“We are capturing every movement and turning it into a data
point. In other sports, a lot of data capture goes on, but the insight is often
not shown to the public. It’s private and team data. Our focus has been to use
it for fan experience.
He continued, “We might not show everything [as part of the
international feed], but we have different versions of the finish‑line moment.
You can do whatever you want — augment reality on top, be in a different
stadium or a different year. It’s as if you can rewind — like a time machine —
and say, ‘This time I want to shoot from this angle.’”
In fact, the VPL for sprinting is the first application for
the optical tracking and processing technology – with more track and field
disciplines including vertical designs for pole vault being explored using the
same underlying technology.
A platform for future data‑driven enhancements
The system already captures full biomechanical data. Future
applications could include deeper analysis segments, or expanded AR overlays.
“You can overlay more data. You can extract more data. It will expand to
another discipline,” Dang Duy said.
‘Alternative’ broadcasts of the live event rendered in
different graphical styles for sponsors or audiences (as trialled by the
Bundesliga during the Supercup at Dortmund last month) for distribution to
YouTube or Twitch might also be possible.
“Broadcast is the starting point but we are going to
prioritise and discuss what makes the most sense. The Ultimate is a bit like a
lab for us — we want to try new things. We hope this will be very welcome. So
far, everyone we have shown the rendering to has been quite excited. You need
to see it working in a live event, but we are confident.”
Coaches and athletes are interested in using the data to
enhance their own performance. “We can see exactly what happened such as take‑off
speed, how an athlete’s feet are positioned out of the blocks. It has multiple
uses.”
He also described the Ultimate as World Athletics’ version
of Formula 1. “When you first introduce something innovative, it costs money
because of R&D but the idea is to make it part of the standard. That means
you make it cheaper over time, you optimise it, and hopefully it can be used
elsewhere. We want to enhance the experience for everyone around athletics.
“I think we’re just at the beginning now, trying to
understand how to tell the story with data. We capture so much data so the
creative question is what story do we want to tell?”
It may even influence other sports. “I’m quite confident that once [other sport federations see it] they will ask, ‘Why are we not doing it?’ Which is good. When people try to copy you, you’re doing something right.”
No comments:
Post a Comment