How Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Used XR to Bring the Peaks of the Dolomites Into View

From its base in the northern Italian town of Cortina, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Sports sits with its studio windows facing the impressive, beautifully snow-capped Dolomite mountains. However, when studio cameras were levelled out to face the presenters on their sofas in front of that breathtaking view, Alex Dinnin, Warner Bros. Discovery's director of graphics and innovation, realised that the pointy mountain tops were missing from the picture.

This is where Dinnin had a brainwave. As Mr Innovation and Graphics himself, the logical answer was to use extended reality (XR) to pop the mountain tops back into the picture.

WBD House uses augmented reality (AR) to make the tops of the mountains outside the window appear in view, so fans are able to see a picture-perfect snow scene behind the presenters.

The problem was a tricky one, but for Dinnin, the solution was simple. He says: When we first came here, you looked through the window and realised that as soon as the cameras are straight on [to the presenters], you don't see the tops of the mountains, and that's kind of the best bit.

So we thought the best way to do it is just to extend it; put a window in the ceiling, he continues. We were talking about using XR to add a bit more depth to the room so we can bring in screens and AR graphics and stuff, this was an extension of that.

Alex Dinnin's XR scene for the Cortina studios at WBD HouseCut-n-shut mountains

Dinnin explains the process to make this cut-n-shut mountain view work: It's really nice and simple. We have three point-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras on top of the roof of WBD House. We stitch the [images from those three PTZs] together.

Put basically, we cut a hole in our XR scene to track it all up, and then we've got a plane literally 30 feet behind our XR model with the mountain top in it from the cameras.

WBD uses Unreal Engine version 5.5, and Vizrt Viz Trio to control that engine.

The action to bring it all together happens in the UK, even though the technology and the scene itself are in Italy.

Dinnin says: Even more complicated, it's all being done back in London in our Chiswick office. We're sending all the tracking data back to the Chiswick office and we have our crew back in Chiswick compositing it all together in real time.

But then also to make it even more complicated, obviously our markets are using it. So our markets are then in control, and they're doing their AR graphics, the little pop-up graphics. So in their PCRs in Norway, Italy, and elsewhere, they're controlling the AR graphics, putting those in via Trio - a Viz controller - and the Trio's controlling the machine in London. It's a crazy set up!

The proof of the process was that no one seemed to notice the XR mountains, which means Dinnin and his team did their jobs perfectly.

Take a look at this short clip to see the XR in action:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IU4lTTVJTnU%3Ffeature=oembed

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/02/24/how-warner-bros-discovery-sport...
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