Throughout Super Bowl week in Houston, FOX Sports will be weaving in various augmented reality packages from its massive 50-foot Techno crane inside Discovery Green leading up until the Big Game.
According to Zac Fields, Senior Vice President Graphic Technology and Innovation, augmented reality has continued to be a focal point for FOX Sports the past few years, with Super Bowl LI “continuing the theme of pushing this forward.” Virtual images can be placed anywhere inside the park on shows such as The Herd, Speak For Yourself and FOX Sports Live, to name a few.
The FOX Sports presence at Discovery Green will feature three separate sets, 14 large LED screens and two touchscreens with augmented reality functionality, according to Sports Video Group. Fields said for one of the upcoming Super Bowl preview shows that the NFL analysts will be able select their Super Bowl pick via an on-set touchscreen, which will then trigger a graphic to be flown out in augmented reality for fans to see.
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“The end result will be a nice, great reveal of this graphic just to enhance the experience a little bit,” Fields said.
All of the monitor graphics displayed from Discovery Green were modeled in 3D ahead of time and then placed on screen combined with video for the augmented reality effect, as Fields explained last week. The graphics templates can be utilized for different shows as the content is swapped out, making for a seamless transition.
“There’s quite a bit of work done on the front end to create the photorealistic 3D graphics that really make these things shine,” he added.
During the Super Bowl itself, FOX Sports will be working with production management company Vizrt to integrate its own statistics packages with augmented reality into the broadcast. FOX will have seven enhanced augmented reality cameras for the Big Game as opposed to three or four for a traditional broadcast.
The SkyCam will serve a dual-purpose, both highlighting the yellow first down marker along with the other six cameras while it will also help with AR graphics, too. The additional cameras will give FOX the opportunity to display bigger 3D graphics in addition to score updates, player positions and statistics on the field itself.