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WEAVR / ESL ONE – VR broadcast

What is Weavr?

Weavr is a technology platform that uses live and historic data to create meaningful and personalised mixed-reality experiences for esports fans.

It incorporates immersive experiences for remote audiences that seamlessly stretch across virtual and physical spaces, multiple displays, mobile devices, VR video telepresence and augmented reality overlays, enabling viewers to teleport in between the live arena, virtual game worlds and augmented living rooms.

Responding to the fans’ eagerness to learn and to become better players, Weavr creates cross-reality spaces in which fans immerse themselves in high fidelity statistics, visualisations and data-driven stories that give them deep insights into the live match.

It moves away from move away from linear “one-for-all” coverage towards hyper-personalised experiences. Weavr experiences are tailored to each viewer’s interests, fully interactive, and provide individualised insights by comparing each viewer’s own amateur performance statistics to those of professional players. Viewers are able to share their individual viewing experiences with other Weavr users and via social networks in real-time, blurring the boundaries between consuming and creating.

 

 

 

Why was Weavr formed?

In 2017, HM Government announced its Industrial Strategy, which is a blueprint for how it intends to help businesses create better, higher-paying jobs with investment in the skills, industries and infrastructure of the future. The Strategy addressed 4 Grand Challenges; the first of these being the area of Artificial Intelligence and data. In 2018, the Government announced it was to invest 18m into this area through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund audience for the future programme to support immersive technologies. Through this, the Government called for industry-led consortia from within creative industries to come forward to form new immersive experiences and test them with large-scale audiences. The Weavr consortium came forward to answer that challenge and was awarded £4m in match funding in the sports entertainment section. It is made up of organisations led by ESL, the largest esports content producer in the world, as well as academics and innovators across immersive technologies, data-driven content production and broadcast.

WEAVR / ESL ONE – VR broadcast

 

Who are the members of the Weavr consortium?

The Weavr consortium is formed of seven organisations:

ESL – www.eslgaming.com
Cybula – www.cybula.com
dock10 – www.dock10.co.uk
Focal Point VR – www.focalpointvr.com
REWIND – www.rewind.co
University of York – www.york.ac.uk
Future Visual – www.futurevisual.com

The project ran from Jan 2019 to Jun 2021 and allowed us to develop and demonstrate a range of live immersive remote presence technologies designed to engage the Sports and eSports Audience of the future.

The following videos provide a short overview of the platform we developed and demonstrated, some of the R&D into ultra high resolution live 360 video we undertook (and are continuing) along with a recap of some of the immersive content we streamed at the live events during the demonstrator.

This video provides an overview of the immersive telepresence platform we developed and demonstrated during Weavr

This video takes a look at our research into delivering human eye resolution 360 video live

This video recaps some of the live events we demonstrated our live stream platform at during the project

Prototype WebXR based multi point of view immersive web player