Bigger, More Versatile, and Less of a Science Project': Inside Eurosport's Enhanced Cube at the US Open

Bigger, more versatile and less of a science project : Inside Eurosport's enhanced Cube at the US Open By Will Strauss, Editor

Friday, September 11, 2020 - 09:05

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Ahead of the US Open tennis finals this weekend, SVG Europe spoke to the team behind Eurosport's updated Cube presentation studio to find out what is different and why, and to get the lowdown on how the new set was designed and built.

The Eurosport Cube is a live presentation studio that brings together a variety of technologies to create an interactive mixed-reality set.

First introduced for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, the pan-European broadcaster is currently using it during coverage of the US Open tennis in Flushing Meadows and will do so again at Roland-Garros for the French Open (21 September to 11 October).

With virtual guests, players and pundits beamed in' from green screen studios at the stadium and around Europe, and making use of augmented reality (AR) and enhanced graphics, the Cube's job is to help the presenter (in the case of the US Open, that's Barbara Schett) and the Eurosport production team to provide viewers with detailed and insightful analysis of the action out on the court.

Although the first incarnation of the Cube won awards for its originality and ingenuity, the one being used for the tennis, which is currently located in a studio in London, is an enhanced version that was originally scheduled to be deployed at the Tokyo Summer Olympics. But, of course, COVID-19 pushed the games back 12 months.

Understandably, some of the new additions and enhancements have been held back for the rescheduled event. But there are still lots to get excited about: the new Cube is bigger, more versatile and more refined than its predecessor.

Watch the Cube in action

Cube version 2.0 features a virtual set extension, expanding the reach of the content outside the footprint of the physical LED video environment and placing the presenter and camera in a fully immersive 360-degree digital environment.

4m x 4m, and made up of over four million LED pixels, the improved version can also be constructed in a day, aided by an auto-calibration system that speeds up the lens and camera tracking setup.

It also includes tracking technology that allows the lighting to automatically follow the presenters in the space, which in turn enables presenters to interact with AR graphics or props.

This version of the Cube was designed by Toby Kalitowski, creative director at BK Design Projects, under the guidance of Eurosport head of graphics and innovation Alex Dinnin.

Dimension Studio, and its partner Nikon, were instrumental in the development of the new Cube which now makes use of Unreal Engine, another change from the original. Gravity Media Group supplied technical facilities.

We removed a wall so that it's now only two sides and a floor. This gave us better camera angles and it also allowed us to introduce a full AR world around it so that it completely enclosed the Cube but gave us a much bigger studio to work with.

With the original version of the Cube having been widely praised, the team would have been forgiven for thinking, well if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. But that is absolutely not how Dinnin saw it.

The Cube was a major success in Pyeongchang, he told SVG Europe during the first week of the US Open.

It won awards, which we are all very proud of. But after the Winter Olympics, we did a deep dive to look at what was good and what was bad about it.

The main complaint, certainly from the production point of view, was that it took a long time to set up. So we looked at the workflow. We tried to make it much more user-friendly so you could just walk into the studio and say: OK, I want that screen there, I want to put this footage in here. And this can now all be done by the mixer all in real-time.

Size matters too, reveals Dinnin. We removed a wall so that it's now only two sides and a floor. This gave us better camera angles and it also allowed us to introduce a full AR world around it so that it completely enclosed the Cube but gave us a much bigger studio to work with.

The enhanced Cube was once again built by White Light and makes use of Disguise hardware.

Andy Hook, technical solutions director at White Light, acknowledges that the original incarnation was a bit of a science experiment.

It was the very first version of the tech with lots of different things pulled together to make it happen, he says. There were a lot of lessons learnt but we've held onto the biggest success which was that you can just bring an athlete into the Cube with zero rehearsal and let them connect with the content around them.

In Pyeongchang, we got some really emotional and powerful content from people who were pretty scared of being on TV. Or maybe had never been on camera before. We wanted to continue to embrace that but make the technical and production workflow easier and make it less of a science experiment.

That manifested itself in a brand new Cube.

We went back to the drawing board and basically rebuilt the whole technical solution around it, continues Hook. So now, with just those two walls and opening the cube right up, you've still got that engagement with the content that's around you and you've still got natural lighting and reflections and all those sorts of things, but you've got this virtual extension too. This extends the content outside of the LED walls so the camera can move around wherever it wants.

In a broadcast environment we were trying to up the game and make it as realistic as possible: taking full advantage of what the Unreal Engine provides but also including the capability to add additional functionality in.

The team is now also able to use one unified system to put all of the cont

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