NBC Sports Uses Cesium for Broadcast Coverage of Summer Games in Paris
NBC Sports, the official American broadcast partner of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, is using Cesium to visualize event locations.
Archery takes place at Invalides. Courtesy NBC Sports.
The Games are currently running through August 11, 2024, with 45 events at venues across Paris, in other regions of France, and nearly 10,000 miles away—including beach volleyball at Eiffel Tower Stadium, football (soccer for those of us in the US) in Nice, and surfing in Tahiti. Massive amounts of data are required to quickly show competition locations and popular landmarks in detail on studio monitors during broadcasts. To manage the data and accurately present the geospatial context for the Games, NBC Sports paired its 3D models of stadiums with Cesium for Unreal and Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles.
The Alexandre III Bridge is the start and finish for the triathlon, the start for the open-water swim, and the finish line for cycling time trials. Courtesy NBC Sports.
Paris is among the 2,500 cities Google Maps Platform has made available as Photorealistic 3D Tiles: high-res imagery draped over 3D mesh and formatted as 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium to optimize streaming of massive 3D geospatial data. With Google’s extensive coverage, Photorealistic 3D Tiles were designed for city scale, and even down to a city block, providing details viewers expect to see in the real world. NBC Sports imports Photorealistic 3D Tiles into its Unreal Engine projects through Cesium ion, where NBC Sports also hosts its 3D models of venues used for the Games. Smooth rendering of these geospecific 3D datasets and realistic lighting enable NBC Sports to orient and immerse viewers.
“Cesium made it easy for our team of Unreal artists to manipulate Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles, building projects that showcase the real-world data to viewers without needing to devote additional resources to acquiring the data. The platform’s speed and quality fit right into our workflow,” said Wade Echer, VP of On-Air Graphics at NBC Sports. “Using Cesium in this manner allowed us to minimize the hours needed to accomplish the job, freeing up other artists for other projects.”
Grand Palais hosts fencing and Taekwondo. Courtesy NBC Sports.
Bring digital worlds to life for any audience with a Cesium ion account.