Virtual Tactic Table
An interactive tool to analyze and explain player movements in football games. It was developed to be used during FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil 2013 and is being used since then in TV Globo shows. It had a significant role in later events such as FIFA Word Cup Brazil 2014 and Olympic Games Rio 2016. For the Olympic Games, we expanded the Virtual Tactic Table to more 6 sports: volleyball, basketball, handball, beach-volley, swimming and artistic gymnastics.
This impressive augmented reality experience brought a couple of interesting challenges for our team. The main one was the precision of the camera tracking. Besides handling lens distortions, CCD displacement and other physical behaviors of a zoom lens, the size of the virtual players and that fact that a human finger would interact with the avatars made this project more challenging.
In this project I acted as the team coordinator as well as software developer. We were 4 developers and 2 digital artists (modeler and animator).
Between the technical features developed, I highlight:
the client-server architecture, where we have 4 client machines, one per each camera, rendering the graphics according to its camera position and the commands given by the server (the table computer itself);
the accurate camera tracking achieved using NCam systems;
stability and robustness. The video feed was inputted into our system, was overlaid with 3D graphics and outputted through the standard protocol of video transmission in 1080i-59.94 SDI.
