You have to take the elevator about as high as possible in the United Center of Chicago, then circle a ring of high-end seats before finally finding a marked part, on a small decal in the top right of a gray door , with the words “REAL VIEW” and the Intel logo. The room is cramped, further constricted by walls covered with television monitors and a team of half a dozen technicians / editors solemnly typing on computer keyboards. The space is small enough that any technician can swing an elbow and conk three heads on the other side of the room.
It doesn’t sound like a place where the way we look at sport is forever changed. But that’s what’s going on in this room, back home – at least last month’s NBA Star Weekend – in the beating heart of Intel True View technology. Here, editors / technicians feed national and regional broadcasters, provide content for virtual reality broadcasting, give the Jumbotrons in the arena a spectacular view as they tinker with 360-degree reruns from all angles in about one minute.
When you look at a room that looks like something The matrix, people do it.
Here in the True View room, a technician sits at a console watching the streams of Luka Doncic doing a 3 pointer from different camera angles during a recent game in Dallas. There are 38 cameras in all and in a matter of seconds, Doncic is paused in the air and we can see it directly. The angle turns. We see Doncic from behind and from all sides – the look on Doncic’s face is frozen, the positioning of the other players is locked. There is a beer seller in the aisles in the background. You can also see it.
“We have cameras in 10 different locations around the building,” said Nadia Banks, business development manager for Intel Sports. “There are multiple lenses at each location, each pod. So there isn’t much going on in the arena that the cameras will miss.”
It is still a relatively new technology for the NBA, installed in only a few places: Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Dallas, Indiana, Washington and Atlanta. An advanced system has also been installed in Sacramento, which will be used for research and development. But the NBA, along with the NFL (where it is located in 17 stadiums) and some football teams in Europe, has made a major bet on True View as the heart of the future of sports broadcasting.
Indeed, True View technology will be the engine of virtual reality broadcasting. Forget your 60-inch QLED – sports viewing is moving to 3D glasses, which can seem daunting for fans who just want to sit back and watch a game. We have looked at sports in much the same way since the first sports broadcast in 1939. This is partly why VR, which has been pondered for years now as Next Big Thing in broadcasting, has not not made its way among the ranks and- file fans. At least not yet.
Intel is betting that demand for RVs will catch up with the constantly improving technology. It’s not that hard to start watching VR games now – those with Oculus or Samsung Gear headsets only need to download the NBA app on TNT VR – but only a small percentage of fans do. . The idea for a company like Intel and its NBA / TNT partnership is to prepare to give broadcasters and fans in the league something they don’t even know they want yet.
As Shawn Bryant, general manager of Intel Sports, said, “It’s the old saying, if you asked in the 1700s what would be a better form of transportation, the answer would have been, ‘A faster horse.’ Nobody would have said “A car.” We are trying to think of the car. “
“Have a nice conversation about what we see”
Throughout the star festivities, Rip Hamilton sat in the front row of the media section above the grounds of the United Center, alongside playmaker Noah Eagle. It was Hamilton’s boom for the weekend, where it gave viewers color by watching the virtual reality of the events of the weekend of the stars. Hamilton – a 14-year-old NBA veteran and three-star – had previously worked as an analyst before, but working in 2-D is different from guiding fans through VR gaming.
Now, in his second season of VR broadcasting, Hamilton has had to get used to the idea that his audience is not limited to the same broadcast stream he sees. They see it from the perspective they want, whether it’s a bird’s eye view, a look from behind the basket or the eyes of the star player. Viewers are not attached to the decisions of the production truck. For Hamilton, the work therefore consists in describing the action in this context.
“You sort of run it,” said Hamilton. “That’s the good thing about it. We are having a conversation with the viewers as if we are all together, sitting in our seats, having a cool conversation about what we see there. So I am able to navigate through the cameras and say, “Hey, look, LeBron James has just rolled up to the rim, looks through the glass cam and sees how high his vertical jump is, how high he reaches the rim.” “
When Bryant says he wants his group to “think about the car,” that’s what he means. The car is the ability to see a game in a completely immersive environment, in the same way that video game enthusiasts can experience Fortnite. You’re not just watching a game, you’re surrounded by the United Center in the same way as a player playing Call of Duty could be surrounded by the burnt streets of Berlin. In reality, NBA2K was a touchstone for the development of the Intel NBA VR product.
“I call it the ‘I have a child’ analysis,” said Bryant. “Watch what your kids like. I have 11 year old twin daughters and a 13 year old son. The way they consume content is a combination of watching the live broadcast, catching up on social media and playing video games. So that creates this cycle, “OK, what can we learn from this?” We learn from the way children interact with the NBA2K game, the different camera angles they expect. “
It is one thing to recreate this decor in a fictional world, but something completely different from applying it to an unpredictable live event. Over the past four years, Intel has increased its ability to provide a realistic experience, adding manpower, improving technology, and incorporating new ideas. Releases are only four years old, but improvement has been constant at all levels. For example, True View editors took four minutes to create a reflection that now only takes 60 seconds. However, this is Intel’s approach to under-promise and over-deliver.
“What we do know,” said Bryant, “is that this generation of fans expects to watch what they want, how they want it, when they want to watch it. What we do with TNT and the NBA, we try to make sure we stay in step with the changing tastes of viewers without lowering the standards. “
In the truck: where VR broadcasting meets
It’s in an icy broadcast truck where all of these elements powering the VR experience come together: the horde of camera modules around the United Center, the front-line True View editing team, comments from Eagle and Hamilton, the vision of a gaming experience that puts a spectator in any place in a given arena. This is where the empty canvas of the VR broadcast is filled and during the All-Star weekend, the truck buzzed, filled with a team of 32 people and almost no empty seats.
At one point, the show’s director, Bobby Hayden, said to lead producer Rusty West, “Do you ever think you would ever see a truckload of a truck?”
At the beginning, the VR operation took place in a van. There were four camera modules and a team of staff with backgrounds in standard broadcasting, struggling to figure out how to produce a virtual reality show.
“The tactics of how to do it, there was no blueprint for it,” said West. “I mean, no one has ever done it – four years ago, no one had ever produced a VR show. Is it the simplest thing, like how to switch from one camera to another? With an ordinary camera in a show, you cut and switch to another camera. But with that, how do you do? So in VR, when the camera changes, it’s a dip into black. It’s a simple thing but it’s a big decision. “
For the crew working on a VR broadcast, there is a multitude of content from the camera modules and the True View cabin. The group has an additional producer who brings together threads from entirely different stories to accompany the action of the game. “She tells her own stories on the side,” said West. “This is the great thing, there is no limit to what we can include.”
With a VR headset and a healthy dose of curiosity, a user can chase endless aspects of a game, whether it’s a player’s sight lines or Jack Nicholson’s sight or anything the beer vendor sees. This level of control is disorienting at first – I tried a VR headset for a Lakers-Celtics game and found that I spent as much time trying to figure out where to click than watching the game itself – but once you focus on what you ” see, it’s an awesome experience.
VR sport is a work in progress, but that’s the idea. It is evolving and becoming more accessible as it does – you already see True View reruns on Turner and in the highlights of the NBA, which is kind of like a little taste of technology, a VR preview.
“We always have to think about what will happen next,” said West. “Our technicians want to kill me all the time because they say,” Let’s just do a show. “But no, we always have to add stuff. It’s the beauty of it all. It’s wide open. Technology is always improving, so we have to tell the stories better to the viewers.”
The product is there, it is well designed, entertaining and interesting. All VR needs now is more users.