How Fox Sports Will Use Virtual Fans Created In Unreal Engine To Fill Empty Stadiums In MLB Shows

Baseball is back. But MLB will look a little different in the world of COVID-19, with empty stadiums filled with silent cardboard cutouts instead of thousands of screaming fans in an effort to prevent the virus from spreading. Unless you are watching on Fox Sports. To pStarting this weekend, the network will not only be playing fake fan tones, but he will also fill the stands with digitally rendered fans for his MLB broadcasts, starting with Saturday's Yankees-Nationals game.

"We believe that crowding and seeing people sitting is part of a broadcast . "

The 30 MLB teams will be relying on fake fan noises in real stadiums (from Sony MLB: The games Show), as well as the usual announcers in the stadium, walk-in music and other aspects of the pomp and circumstance that accompany a Major League Baseball game. But Fox Sports is the only onebroadcaster who announced plans for virtual fans.

"We believe that crowding and seeing people sitting is part of a show, part of broadcasting high performance sports in the big leagues. So we wanted to find a solution for that, says Brad Zager, executive producer and head of production and operations at Fox Sports.

No fans? Not on FOX Sports.

Thousands of virtual fans will attend FOX's MLB games this Saturday. pic.twitter.com/z9oQU0rYuC

- FOX Sports (@FOXSports) 23juillet2020

"UsI'm not trying to cheat on anyone, this is always play. But plan for plan, when you watch a program, it is not more obvious that youardez what's normally a show with fans in an empty stadium and that sounds weird to you - we want to give people a sense of normalcy, Zager says. "And we felt like going down that route and trying to use a virtual crowd, hopefully will make it blend in, and you can focus more on the game because you don't think about the void of the game. 'a Major League Baseball stadium during the game. ”

The effect is a combination of technologies you may have seen before. The augmented reality software used to insert crowds is called Pixotope , which worked on graphics AR for things like the terrifying Super Bowl and The Weather Channel storm warning protests.

It works by taking advantage of graphics (created by the creative agency Silver Spoon Animation ). In Epic 's Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is used here for the same reason that it is popular for creating video games or for creating virtual backgrounds on the set for shows like Le mandalorien . Unlike most movie graphics, which need to be rendered in post-production after the fact, Unreal can render in real time, which makes it much more suitable for live TV.

Finally, SportsMedia Technology (SMT) - the same company that handles most of the sports-oriented computer overlays you know well, like the yellow first line in soccer, the clock on screen and scoreboard, and more - manages camera tracking to insert these graphics on live camera feeds. Four cameras - high house, center field, high first and third high camera - will show the fans virtual.

"We are figuring this out now, and we will continue to do so.Read this process as you go. "

Fox Sports producers will be able to control things like fill level 'virtual crowds for a given game, the nature that weather fans are dressed for and the percentage of the crowd that will be home versus away supporters, although the company is still figuring out how he will make some of those decisions. "We are figuring that out right now, and we will continue to evolve that process throughout this weekend and game to game, week to week. weekdays ", Zager says.

Fox Sports shows will also incorporate fictional audio from fans played in the stadium as the background for clips from microphone from players (like during pitches) and other in-game audio, but this will also increase that live audio on its own side, as it did forMLS games.

And while the interactions between virtual crowds and audio will be for the basic moments (like basic cheers, boos, and wave), the company hopes to better integrate the two as it gets practicedmore during the season. "This is something that we hope will become even more collaborative and on the same page as we do more and more, being able to combine audio and crowd together. "

For now, Virtual Fans will only stream on MLB games on Fox, but digitally generated fans may appear elsewhere as well. Zager says the company is working with all of its sports sponsors, and tha "as we get closer to the downfall of football and other sports, if we feel like it is headed in the right direction, we launch and deploy it in other sports as well.