Professional football league equips Parc des Princes with Intel immersive replay technology

[ad_1]

The Professional Football League continues its efforts in terms of digital transformation. It announces this February 6 a partnership with Intel to equip certain French stadiums with a volumetric ehealth device. This technology, called True View, makes it possible to offer viewers immersive replays, in particular 360 ° rotations around the action to better understand a situation, as well as a vision of the action "from the player's point of view" during a free kick or penalty.

The first French stadium to benefit from it is the Parc des Princes. The work has already been carried out, and a Review was carried out on Saturday 1 February during the match between Paris Saint-Germain and Montpellier Hérault Sport Club. Its first visible use by the public will take place Sunday evening, during the PSG match against Olympique Lyonnais, which will be broadcast on Canal +.

38 cameras, 40 servers and 2 technicians

The device consists of 38 5K cameras. 35 of them are mounted on the concrete beams which overhang the stands, while the other three are on the roof of the stadium. They are arranged very precisely, down to the pixel, and synchronized with each other so as to cover all angles of play at all times. This data is transmitted by optical fibers to a data center located in the basement, which reconstructs the 3D sequence from a point cloud. This allows the realization to place a "virtual camera" anywhere on the ground, and to obtain angles of view impossible to film otherwise.

40 servers are used: one per camera, plus two others who manage the whole. Intel requires, calculations are carried out by Xeon processors, supported by proprietary "frame grabbers" using FPGA supplied by Altera. As the name suggests, a "frame grabber" is a component that captures individual images in a ehealth stream. The cameras themselves only consist of a sensor and a lens. In total, approximately 250 TB of data is generated during 90 minutes of play.

 An Israeli nugget

True View technology comes from the Israeli start-up Replay Technologies, which Intel bought in 2016. Today's True View teams include more than 300 engineers, all based in Israel.

Two people are in charge of the system during matches: an assistant director who chooses which sequences to propose to the director and an engineer who ensures that everything works correctly. They are installed at a dedicated assembly station. Once a sequence has been identified, the calculation time required for its creation is 2 to 3 minutes. On average, around ten scenes are offered for production during each match, and 70 to 80% of them are broadcast.

Soon in the cloud

The images produced for the final broadcast are in 1080p resolution, but with degraded visual quality, the result of the reconstruction of the image. Intel is obviously working to improve image quality, whether from an algorithmic or hardware point of view. A major gain, such as the transition to 4K, is however conditional on the creation of cameras with much higher resolution, which do not exist today. In the immediate future, Intel is mainly focusing on the development of a cloud infrastructure that will do without a local data center. The data will be encoded in H.264 and sent to the cloud, which will allow the sequences to be generated in real time (at a refresh rate of 30 frames per second).

The LFP wants to strengthen the prestige of Ligue 1 internationally

If this technology aims to improve the spectator experience, its implementation is very clearly a seductive operation towards broadcasters. "This is a very important project for the League, in particular to increase the value of our international broadcasting rights, said Didier Quillot, Executive Director General of the LFP, at a press conference. We are lagging behind in the major European leagues, and we have worked hard to be the third football league to deploy this technology, before the Bundesliga and Serie A. "

This is obviously not to displease the national broadcasters either. "We talked about it with the directors and with Canal +, who in fact will be the first beneficiary of this technology, and everyone is impatient to take it in hand", says Didier Quillot. As for Mediapro, which has beaten BeIN over broadcasting rights for the next season, its teams are already used to this device. It was deployed to six stadiums in the Spanish league, La Liga, in 2018. The Premier League followed last year with three stadiums (clubs from Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester).

Marseille and Lyon equipped during August

In France, installations in two other stadiums are planned:Orange Marseille Olympique Velodrome and Olympique Lyonnais Groupama Stadium. They are expected to be equipped in August for the start of the 2020/2021 season. Deployments that "represent a substantial budget", after Didier Quillot.

Intel only intended its technology for the most popular sports, and therefore those most able to afford it. In addition to European football, three leagues make use of it. United States : NBA (basketball), MLB (baseball) and NFL (American football). Intel is also a partner of the Olympic Games, and is already planning immersive coverage of certain events in 2020, 2022 and 2024.

Julien Bergounhoux

 @JBergounhoux 

[ad_2]