Cesium Orients and Informs FOX Sports Football Fans
On any given Sunday, Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles are used to orient and immerse FOX Sports' football fans.
Atlanta to Hollywood on FOX NFL SUNDAY. Courtesy FOX Sports.
For FOX NFL SUNDAY, the XR team builds virtual 3D cities to highlight team locations and then fly to the studio in Los Angeles, where the crew of analysts and Hall-of-Famers comments on the matchups of the day. These immersive 3D models are a new feature this season, enabling FOX Sports to visualize specific skylines and customize them with lighting and atmosphere each week for the best production quality and value. Designed for city scale, Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles show viewers the details they would encounter in the real world and reduce FOX’s need to acquire data in other ways.
FOX Sports' XR team uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to build virtual 3D cities to highlight game locations, like the Steelers-Falcons matchup in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Courtesy FOX Sports.
The NFL's 32 teams have 30 full-time stadiums and cities among them, plus the occasional international trip. Because Google Maps Platform’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles pull from Google's extensive high-resolution imagery, FOX Sports is well covered with game locations, and draping this imagery over 3D mesh and formatting it as 3D Tiles provides accurate geospatial context for fans, optimized for streaming for the on-air graphics team.
FOX Sports' XR specialists combine Photorealistic 3D Tiles; their own 2D imagery; and 3D models of clouds, water, watercraft, and hand-modeled trees in Unreal Engine, fusing these disparate datasets of varying sizes, georeferencing them, and streaming them via Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal. Fans see a polished, realistic scene that seamlessly transitions to commentators in the studio.
“In the past, we’ve used aerial imagery, but we have not encountered a tool that has allowed us as much flexibility and detail as Cesium. We put a high value on our production quality, bringing out the most in our brand,” said Zac Fields, SVP of Graphic Technology at FOX Sports. “Beyond a cool visual, it’s very informative, showing cities around the world with context.”
After seeing the matchup location, the viewer flies to the studio in Los Angeles. Courtesy FOX Sports.
FOX NFL SUNDAY airs at 12 p.m. ET. Fields plans to extend the Cesium/Google combo to other sports, like international soccer and Major League Baseball.
Learn to add Photorealistic 3D Tiles to your Unreal Engine project, and bring both art and information to your viewers.