This year’s French Open is underway from Roland-Garros Stadium in Paris and while it’s another chance for a champion to be crowned, new technology is being displayed in the RG Lab that should also have tennis fans excited.
Located within the facilities, the redesigned 2016 RG Lab aims to engage visitors in the world of connected tennis and the latest technologies while focusing heavily on virtual reality. One attraction for guests to check out is live VR coverage of the matches courtesy of three French-based companies. The technology incorporated will be a VR camera system, integration of digitally inserted graphics, and encoding through a cloud-based service called FireKast.
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A mounted Orah 4i camera, which contains four smaller lenses, is placed above the umpire chair on all three courts and provides the broadcast center the ability to create a 360-degree, 4K image. Cedric de Saint-Martin told Sports Video Group that once the image is produced, a logo and graphics are put onto it and sent to the cloud where it can be utilized on different applications. This technology can also be experienced freely on a RG360° virtual reality app for smartphones and Samsung VR gear.
In addition to offering a range of demonstrations on artificial intelligence and augmented reality (via holographs), France Télévisions is giving visitors the opportunity to have a digital avatar made of themselves. Step inside the 3D scanning booth and a clone is created which is sharable on social media and can play tennis in a virtual manner.
Longines, a Swiss watchmaking company, is presenting a tennis simulator, Hawk-Eye, so participants can see what it’s like to be a player and practice their serves. This technology has been around the game of tennis since 2002 and is currently used in over 80 tournaments, as stated on their website.
French financial firm, BNP Paribas, is sponsoring the We Are Tennis Virtual Room where fans are immersed in virtual reality where they can learn and perform a choreographed dance in an interactive 3D environment.
Virtual reality is a new sensation that will help shift the focus of the RG Lab away from Ultra High Definition and 4K video, which has been prominent for the last couple years. Overall, it will be most interesting to see how fans react to these tech bells and whistles at the RG Lab as the world’s best tennis players put on the real show on the clay.
