WBS Virtual Studio
This year we were commissioned by Wimbledon Broadcast Services (WBS) to give a face lift to the players TV interview room at the All England Club. Each year broadcasters such as BBC Sport, ESPN, FOX, SKY and Eurosport descend on SW19 for the Championships and broadcast day and night, both on and off the court.
Post-match, players head to various interview locations during the fortnight and do live interviews for the World to see. We were given the keys to one small room in particular and briefed to transform it from a flat printed backdrop, to a unique never-before-seen location from within the Club.
We were able to leverage the full power of the Unreal engine using Pixotope, from The Future Group, to create a beautiful room full of detail modelled from the Clubhouse and surrounding rooms. The only real thing in the 4m x 4m green screen space are two blue chairs, even the table is virtual. The backdrop through the windows is also live, direct from the players balcony looking over the outside courts.
StarTracker, from Mo-Sys, provided the camera tracking solution, giving us maximum flexibility and reliability throughout the two-week Championships. Easy to setup and even easier to maintain.
Watch the video below to see the Virtual Studio in more detail.
Pixotope utilises Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to produce photorealistic rendering in real-time. The combination of Unreal Engine and Pixotope enables designers to rapidly create virtual sets, virtual environments, and augmented content, with terrain and foliage, with particle systems (rain, smoke, fire, hair, cloth, explosions etc.), and with simulated camera and lens properties (lens distortion, depth of field, chromatic aberration).
Read more about Pixotope here
StarTracker offers unlimited freedom of movement and gives accurate position, rotation and lens data in realtime – this makes it ideal for Steadicam and handheld. You can rotate the studio camera 360 degrees, and move it to any position in the studio, even right to the edge, as long as enough “stars” are in sight of the tracking camera. Other systems are often restricted in their tracking volume. StarTracker can track in 3m to 20m high studios.
Read more about StarTracker here
SKY Sports Germany interview MOOV’s Director & Co-Founder Nev Appleton:
