Live From Paris 2024: OBS's Matt Millington on the Expanded Use of Athletes Moment' and Launching an AR Studio OBS digital efforts take leap as the power of video beyond the big screen continues to grow By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Thursday, August 8, 2024 - 5:41 am
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The efforts that OBS puts into digital-related projects and services continue to expand. At the Paris Games, the effort is highlighted by an AR studio for athletes at the Olympic Village, the expansion of Athletes Moments to more venues, and content components of the OBS Video Player made available as widgets for easy integration into a rightsholder's own apps and digital environments.
OBS has traded virtual reality for augmented reality, most notably with an augmented-reality studio in the Olympic Village, where athletes can do interviews with rightsholders or have OBS staffers shoot social-media clips. The beauty of augmented reality for us, says Matt Millington, director, digital content production, OBS, is that it is super-easy to distribute, with no app required, no special equipment.
The studio has 29 cameras in a circle to capture the actions of an athlete in the middle of the circle. The signals from the cameras are processed, and CPUs synthesize all the angles with audio. The end clip is a high-quality digital representation of the athlete that the viewer can spin around and view from any direction.
OBS's Matt Millington in an AR studio that is located at the IBC and is similar to the one at the Olympic Village
When they do a back flip or do flares on floor, says Millington, you can spin them around and look at them, pause them and look at them. It gives a really good perspective on the athlete's movement.
A couple of render passes improve the quality, he adds, noting that, in less than an hour, the clip is ready for distribution. Athletes can distribute content on their own social media, and a library of clips is accessible by rightsholders and national organizing committees.
Because this AR image of Matt Millington in the studio was live, its quality does not match the final quality once the image has been rendered a few times.
The intention was to get a mixture of styles of content, says Millington. We've got some people doing sport guides or showing their poses for things like throwing a javelin or their training exercises. But we've also got lots of humorous and goofy ones, which is actually what they tend to prefer to do. We've got probably more of those than we have of the sporty ones, but we've got a good mix.
There had been concern that the athletes might not want to do it, but there has been a ton of athlete interest. And the athletes themselves have benefited: in performing a skill, they can see their form from all angles - suggesting the potential for the technology to become a training aid.
We've done around 900 videos, says Millington. Some of those have two, three, or four athletes as they do a group video. That means we've probably got more than 1,000 athletes taking part, which is way more than we anticipated.
Helping drive athlete enthusiasm is that, in many respects, this year's Games are the first involving a large number of athletes who have grown up with social media and understand the power a clip can have in reaching current fans and making new ones. Some athletes' poses or moves, for example, are trending on TikTok. And they're familiar with vertical video, adds Millington, which is how we're presenting it.
As for the interviews, rightsholders can tap into the augmented-reality set from either the IBC or their home-country studio. We can offer a live interview with an athlete in either 2D or 3D, depending on their integration capability, says Millington. If they're able to use something like Unreal Engine in a virtual studio, we give them the 3D version. The beauty of that is, they can pan around the athlete with their camera.
Rightsholders are in more of a test mode with that feature, he notes, but it could possibly be an important production tool for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, given the long distances between event clusters. We could give instant access to the athletes for a rightsholder who is unable to have teams in every one of these locations. Then we will really see the benefits.
Expanding the Athletes Moment Project Millington and his team oversee the Athletes Moment, a workflow born out of the pandemic to bring some emotion to venues where there were no fans. A video-conference call, using a large TV monitor, is set up between the athlete at the venue (and prior to their hitting the mixed zone for interviews) and family or friends at a remote location. The technical infrastructure for Athletes Moment has been expanded to include about 20 sports.
The athletes loved it, says Millington. Coming to Paris, obviously, there are crowds, so there was a concern that maybe it wouldn't be as popular. But there are a lot of families who cannot make it to Paris for a number of reasons, so we decided to keep going, and it's doing really well. With several days still to go, we've already got more Athlete Moments than we did for Tokyo 2020.
The workflow once again involves a control room in Brussels, where the Moments are coordinated with moderators at each venue (family members are sent a link with instructions on when to dial in), and the quality of the experience has been improved. We fined-tuned it a bit so it looks nicer than in the past, says Millington. There is also no jarring delay. The production team at the venue now has a pure live feed, which is a big improvement. In addition, we can handle about 12 Moments at once.
The Athletes Moment is available to all the athletes, not just medal hopefuls and those expected to do well
