SailGP Season 5: AI cameras to get viewers closer to the action

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Friday, November 22, 2024 - 10:33
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Getting viewers closer to the action is a priority of all production teams, and the SailGP team plans to do this during its 2025 season via AI-enabled, gyro-stabilised cameras placed on the water.

Four of the PTZ cameras will be mounted onto the racing marks – the buoys on the water that establish the course.

Traditionally, sailing marks have been held in place by anchors, which can create a headache for the race management team if it wants to quickly move the course according to the wind.

“Just like you’d have a camera in the pit wall on a Formula E or a Formula One track, this will give a similar effect”

SailGP uses autonomous racing marks, and for the 2025 season it has built its own that will be able to better cope with the demands of strong winds and tides and remain in place when required with the ability to move according to the race management team’s requirements.

SailGP director of LiveLine Tom Peel explains: “We’ve been we’re developing our own marks that will move around the race course and follow waypoints. We can basically drive them to the new positions depending on the wind angles, so they can change the course quite easily.

“They have electric motors and GPS systems on board to hold themselves in place. But the other great thing about that is that we’re also going to add autonomously driven cameras to the marks.”

Adds SailGP executive producer Chris Carpenter: “The boats will be flying past and around them at close proximity. We tested one of these out at the last event of Season 4 in San Francisco and we loved the results.”

The plan is to introduce four cameras: one on the start line, one that sits on the first mark, one on the bottom gate and one on the finish line.

“The boats go past these marks really, really closely. So, just like you’d have a camera in the pit wall on a Formula E or a Formula One track, this will give a similar effect with one difference that we can actually pan.”

Although initially remotely operated, the cameras will eventually be AI-enabled.

“To start with they will be remotely operated, just like the cameras are on the yachts,” says Carpenter.

“But over time, because we know where the cameras are exactly, we know where all the yachts are, and there are billions of points of data we can use to understand the action, such as ‘this boat’s just gone from 15 knots down to two knots, so it’s probably had an incident’. Over time, the cameras will learn where the story is and what to focus on.

“These cameras could be the future of sailing production,” explains Carpenter.

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