Creating a virtual race of champions

Inspired Entertainment talks to TVBEurope about their work on the Virtual Grand National

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Jenny PriestleyPublish date:

Apr 12, 2018Social count:

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ITV4 will bring together some of the most famous Grand National winners in a UK TV first when it broadcasts a virtual Race of Champions on Friday evening.

The race will be part of a preview show that also includes the Virtual Grand National, a CG-rendered race featuring all of this years competitors.

Both races have been create by Inspired Entertainment, the UK market leader in virtual sports.

Inspired got involved after discussion with the Jockey Club of Great Britain, the owners of Aintree race course. The company already creates virtual horse racing, but was excited to have the opportunity to create something with the look and feel of the iconic horse race.

"Our standard horse racing product features 8, 12, 16 runners and lasts about two or three minutes," explains Steve Rogers, chief commercial officer, digital games, at Inspired Entertainment. "The Grand National is obviously nine to 10 minutes long, it has 40 horses, it has fallers, its got fences collapsing."

"We spoke to the Jockey Club and said wed like to create a feature race and have two concepts. One is a Virtual Grand National which is like a predictor race where you put the runners and riders from Saturdays race into our software and see what it does with the outcome, see how close it can get to the actual result.

"Then we had the idea of creating a different version which actually pitted the best runners and riders of yesteryear against each other, so Amberleigh House versus Red Rum versus Mr Crisp versus whatever," Rogers continues. "Its a fascinating concept."

The team at Inspired began by creating a virtual Aintree. They filmed the Grand National course the day after 2016s race. "We went there and filmed the track using drone cameras, tracking cameras and cherry pickers, and we filmed every aspect of Aintree as close as it is to race day," explains Rogers.

"We then build that into a 3D environment. So essentially weve got full camera freedom around this virtual Aintree, theres no horses obviously at this point. Then we remove all the fences, so take out the real fences and replace them with our virtual fences because they need to be able to smash, fall down and break apart as the virtual horses go over them. Then we build the virtual elements back in. So now you have a real environment but with virtual components within it."

Having created the course, the Inspired team then had to create the horses which meant they a change their standard virtual horse model and running cycles. But that wasnt so easy: "The problem was our horses run in a sprint and obviously a horse cant sprint for 10 minutes around the Grand National track," smiles Rogers. "We had to change our horse algorithms so the horses movement would change over the life cycle of the race, the horse would tire towards the end."

Inspired didnt just think about the horses that will make it round the two laps of the Aintree course, they have also included fallers, riderless horses and even people to patch the iconic fences back together once the horses had jumped over them.

Key to the development of the Race of Champions has been input from jockeys who have made it round the 4 miles 514 yards course. The team at Inspired sat down with the likes of AP McCoy, Richard Pittman, Katie Walsh and various people at Aintree itself. "It went through various iterations so there was a fairly lengthy development cycle and then we came up with something that looks like the Grand National and we replicated the camera angles," says Rogers.

The horses themselves have been built with artificial intelligence within the model: "That means they cant run into each other," he explains. "They have a forcefield around them in terms of where they move in respect of each other. That was all built for the Grand National product."

So, in terms of the race itself how does Inspired determine the result? Surely everyone would expect Red Rum, who won the National three times in the 1970s, to be the obvious winner? "It is randomly determined but we are conscious of the skill of the horses. So if youre running the Race of Champions you obviously know that Red Rums statistics stack up there," says Rogers.

"Obviously some of these horses may have never raced against each other, so we had to look at their statistics. We also had to set the going, so we said lets assume to the going is soft and then we looked at how all the horses ran over soft ground. We entered as many statistics as we could into the model, gave them respective probabilities and then the software determines the outcome and then our graphics render that."

ITVs programme wont be broadcast live, which means the Race of Champions also wont be run live. "Were leaving it as late as possible to create the race itself," says Rogers. "Weve got everything to produce a result for both the Virtual Grand National and the Race of Champions and well deliver them to ITV as pre-recorded elements." Post production on the Virtual Grand National is being provided for ITV by Timeline Television.

The programme will mark the first time a mainstream broadcaster has shown a virtual sport. Does Rogers see a time when vsports (as its known) becomes as popular esports? "I think virtual sports is very compelling and we obviously try very hard to make our content look as life-like as possible," he says. "I think there is certainly an opportunity.

"There is demand for sport all day every day now. Football isnt broadcast every day, American Football only happens two days a week, so theres pent up demand for sport. So alongside betting as well, I do think there is an opportunity in the future to have more mainstream coverage for virtual sports."

The Virtual Grand National will be

LINK:	https://www.tvbeurope.com/features/creating-a-virtual-race-of-champion...
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