An Extraordinary Piece of Kit: Discovery Unveils New Look Cube With Enhanced Analytics Capabilities For Tokyo Olympics

An extraordinary piece of kit: Discovery unveils new look Cube with enhanced analytics capabilities for Tokyo Olympics By Heather McLean, Editor

Thursday, July 15, 2021 - 15:36

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The Eurosport Cube for Tokyo 2020 is set over three floors with seven different rooms'

Discovery has unveiled an enhanced three-storey, multiple room' Cube for the Tokyo Olympics that includes cutting edge analytical capabilities and a more gamified viewing experience for sports fans.

The new extended reality Cube studio will be the centrepiece of Discovery's coverage of Tokyo 2020, showcasing new software and motion graphics that will push the Cube's analytical capabilities to a whole new level, while giving viewers the chance to deep dive into the details of why an athlete won gold - or did not.

We're getting to boundaries now where are we going to need to find technology providers that can create and develop at the rate of which we can now think. Our production teams now across Europe are starting to realise the power of this Cube. It's really only bounded by our creative thinking process

The multi-location Cube studio for Tokyo 2020 features seven different immersive real-time video environment locations, or rooms', which will be used for different shows, bespoke 360-degree beauty shots of Tokyo as backdrops, newly-released 3D Zoom software to allow viewers to see wider panoramic views of Cube locations, and a virtual set extension with cameras able to roam around the digital environment, taking the gamification of this presentation studio to new heights.

Discovery's host presenter at the Cube, Reshmin Chowdhury, with Andrew Georgiou, president of sports at Discovery both in London, while Scott Young, Discovery's senior vice president of content and production, speaks to the pair live from the Olympic IBC in Tokyo. On the virtual TV behind the group, Young shows what the studio he is speaking from looks like

Extraordinary piece of kit

On the new enhanced Cube, Scott Young, Discovery's senior vice president of content and production, says from Tokyo: Well, this is an extraordinary piece of kit. Virtual studios are not new in the world, but what Alex Dinnin [Discovery Sports' head of graphics and innovation] and his team have created is extraordinary. It's world-class.

Adds Young: This is virtual studios next level. It's quite extraordinary.

The Cube has been designed to create a virtual environment that will bring Japan to the viewer at home. This includes the atmosphere in the country as well, so if the weather is bad, the Cube will reflect that.

Explains Young: We had a cracking thunderstorm here the other day that nearly tore the place apart, so how we react to weather in this environment is a key piece. You can see the trees and the plants behind you [and] we can start to make them sway in the background to get the environment going. If it's getting a little stuffy [in Japan] we can open the doors, we can get a bit of breeze in there for you; a few more keystrokes and the Cube comes to life.

Coverage within the Cube will follow the Japanese clock, creating night and day effects, and the presentation will move around the virtual three-storey building to different rooms' to suit each show style, from informal to formal.

Andrew Georgiou, president of sports at Discovery, comments on the night to day and multiple room aspects of the new Cube: Certainly providing a different setting for the talent at different points in the day to create a different feel and a different outlook for the audience [is key]. I think if you've got two to three weeks of continuous coverage with the same setting it can get quite monotonous, I suspect, so [we're] providing a different setting for everyone in order to be able to then [move] into a different place, a different setting. If we're doing something relaxed you've got a soft area, if you're doing an analysis it's the formal area, with different times of day and different lighting. You've got different ways of creating a different atmosphere that I think makes it a little bit more authentic for the viewer to be able to experience the Games.

Discovery's home of the Olympics in Europe, the new Cube, has launched with cutting edge analytics which will be ready for six or seven sports by the time the sporting event begins. Here, athlete and on-screen talent, Greg Rutherford, demonstrates some of the new capabilities

Expanded virtual environment

On why Discovery has chosen to expand on its virtual environment in the Cube far beyond what has been bought to screens up until now, Young says: The art of the Cube is if you're sitting at home watching our content, after a while you sort of forget that it's not real. [This is] a broadcast for two weeks with an enormous number of sports and athletes and stories to tell and we want to keep the environment in which we're telling that story as fresh as possible. So the reason that we've created a broader environment [within the Cube] is so we can have different locations to move around, and the reason we go from night to day is to be there and experience the environment as if we were here.

That's why we're playing around with the wind [moving] the trees, and the doors [that] can open up, continues Young. You want it to be an interactive experience that when you're sitting at home; it's not just a passive set. And when you start to work with suppliers like Unreal Engine, you realise there is a lot that they can do. I think the gaming world is very adapt at understanding how you create a life-like as possible environment for people who spend a great deal of time in those environments.

The genius behind the Cube is actually sitting in the machine software at Stockley

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