Paris 2024: Taking a step forwards with BBC Sport’s Olympic studio combining real and virtual worlds
BBC Sport’s Olympics studio will focus on the outdoors, whether it is the real outdoors, or a virtual one
BBC Sport is stepping up its studio game for the Paris 2024 Olympics, combining views of the legendary Eiffel Tower where the broadcaster will be based, with a classic Parisian square brought to viewers on a green screen.
While for the Euros the BBC Sport studio combined the real view of the Brandenburg Gate with extended reality (XR) technology merged into LED screens to create a 360 degree, museum-style setting, the Olympics studio will focus on the outdoors, whether it is the real outdoors, or a virtual one.
BBC Sport has created its own virtual Parisian square that sits ‘outside’ the studio in the heart of the city
Green screen magic
Paris 2024 will see XR, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) come into play with the real world, says BBC Sport design director, John Murphy. Speaking to SVG Europe from Salford just one day before the Opening Ceremony for the Olympics, he notes: “In Berlin we were using LED screens with extended reality. Paris is different in the sense that we are not using LED. We have obviously a fantastic backdrop, with the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadero, which is a real hard set looking out.
“But what we’ve done is we’ve created a 360 hybrid studio. We’ve put a green screen extension onto the reverse side of the studio, and that means then what we can do is we can go and have different standing positions in virtual areas.
“Also what we’ve done is almost a little bit like Tokyo, where we’ve created our own Parisian square virtually that sits ‘outside’ the studio, so when there’s moments for doing different kinds of conversation and chat, we can go into this virtual Parisian square, which is a bit more relaxed. They’ve got table and chairs there, but it’s all in the same studio, in the small green screen space.”
“This was never about creating a virtual studio to just be virtual. We know how good the ‘real’ is already; the virtual is there to compliment it editorially and to give us those little moments where you can break away from the day’s coverage and just do things slightly differently”
Murphy goes on: “That gives us that flexibility of having the main presenting area with the Eiffel Tower, but then it gives us a chance to go and have two or three different breakout areas [using the green screen] to present slightly differently or to do different links, just to break up the programme and the day really.”
Thinking back, Murphy states: “This was never about creating a virtual studio to just be virtual. We know how good the ‘real’ is already; the virtual is there to compliment it editorially and to give us those little moments where you can break away from the day’s coverage and just do things slightly differently. That’s the whole idea behind it.”
When presentation needs to change within the studio, the cameras turn from the ‘real’ view to the opposite wall, where a green screen is set up in the corner of the studio.
Says Murphy: “The cameras effectively just turn themselves around and we’ve got a defined corner where you can have seating, stand ups and that kind of thing, and we change the virtual to marry up with that.”
An exciting innovation in the studio is a virtual floor map. Murphy explains: “One of the really cool things we’ve got with this studio as well is that we’ve created a virtual floor, which marries up with the real floor. We’ve created an underground, under-the-glass map, which can take you from where we are in reality to the different venues, and the presenters can stand on that and interact with it. That’s pretty cool.”
Outside the box
The studio has been a work in progress for around 10 months. Murphy explains the process: “Going back to October time, when we knew where we knew we had the location where we were going to be at the Eiffel Tower, we did a pitch process for designers to come and pitch a physical set design, but married with our brief which was to also combine that with a 360 design of the studio as well. Following that pitch process, Toby Kalitowski of BK Designs and Jim Mann of Lightwell, who we’ve worked with before on the Tokyo Olympics set, our Winter Olympics set, and our Match of the Day studio, won the pitch together.
The green screen enables BBC Sport to merge the real world view of the Eiffel Tower with virtual locations outside of the studio
“What was great about their pitch is that they thought outside of the box; they gave us not just the 360 studio, but the idea of a separate square that you could go to at various times.”
The BBC sport team of Murphy, BBC Sport’s head of major events and general sport Ron Chakraborty, BBC Sport executive producer Sally Richardson, plus Kalitowski and Mann on the set and VR design, have colluded together to mould the ideas and technologies into the final studio.
Read more Paris 2024: BBC Sport on its remote production workflow for the Summer Games
Moov won the graphics contract pitch process, and is implementing and operating the VR and AR. Murphy says: “So as well as the onscreen graphics and everything else, Moov is delivering the implementation of the studio design and controlling it for us and operating it for us, and doing the keying and the AR control and all of that. But also with that, we’re using the BBC’s Vizrt platform which is in Salford – we sit on that real estate anyway so we’re using all of that – and we’ve got our own small BBC Sport graphics team, and we’ve had people helping Moov with that control and everything as well.”
The studio is being powered by Unreal Engine for virtual rendering, plus BBC Sport’s Vizrt kit which is controlling the system from Salford under the stewardship of BBC Sport senior software engineer, Andy Bowker.
BBC Sport has also filmed a large number of Team GB athletes prior to the Games to turn them into 360 avatars for use in the studio over the course of the Games. The plugin used to create the avatars was from Pixotope, but the files will be played back through Vizrt.
BBC Sport crew making final adjustments to the set for Paris 2024
Marrying up real and virtual
In terms of challenges the main one occurred once the team got on site at the OBS broadcaster’s studio block overlooking the Eiffel Tower, to find that the studio spec was slightly different to how it had been expected.
Murphy explains: “There were certain things on the studio build that were not quite how we thought they were going to be. Obviously when you are doing virtual studios as well as real, and marrying up the real world and the virtual, everything has to be really precise. There were some challenges on that which were faced, but it wasn’t anything major to overcome,” he says.
“The reason for that is just because the people we’re working with were very familiar with this area, so Jim and Toby and Moov. Also, with the green screen and marrying that up with the real world, that’s something we’ve done in the past. So that side of it has been done before, utilising Unreal gaming engine technology to do the rendering.”
Murphy concludes on the studio design that, “I would say this is what we call another step forwards, in terms of the realism and the marrying up of the real and virtual, to what we’ve done before”.
He adds: “Probably was one of the main things to overcome was that as it’s quite a detailed studio in terms of the design, when you are working with virtual design, obviously the more detailed you make it, the heavier it is on performance and actually causing issues for the performance of engines. So we had to go through a lot of that optimisation and everything, but everyone’s done a great job.”
Another virtual set for Paris 2024 is in a striking marketplace in the city
Watch all the Olympic Team GB action live on BBC One, iPlayer and the Red Button from 26 July 2024