Immersive & Interactive AR Graphics & Environments for Broadcast Applications

Caroline Stedman Mishra MA BSc, Saurabh Ranjan BTech, Sanjyot Dahale BE,

This paper presents a Mixed Reality Toolkit solution for visualisation and interaction with broadcast AR graphics, with a multi-camera spectator camera solution so that the audience can see the same graphics that the presenter is interacting with. This solution was developed by Disney Star’s R&D Lab, Star Lab. The purpose of the toolkit is to provide a more immersive experience for both audiences and presenters and to aid in storytelling around sports data in cricket broadcast programming. This paper describes the background and inspiration for the project which started with the Hololens demos by Epic Games and Microsoft. It then goes on to describe the technical specifications and workflow of the system. There is an evaluation which details the technical roadblocks encountered by the team and steps taken to solve them and/or possible future solutions that will provide improvements to the system. The evaluation also details the results of a subjective user test from both presenter and audience points of view. The paper concludes with a summary of the state of the industry in the field of broadcast augmented reality graphics and how our product is novel in its capabilities and approach and plans for its next stages of development, as well as an outlook for the future of interactive AR graphics and virtual sets.