We wanted to create a more immersive experience for both audiences and presenters and to aid in storytelling around sports data in cricket broadcast programming. From our previous experiments with VR cricket, we knew XR was a powerful tool to leverage.

We invented a Mixed Reality Toolkit solution for visualisation and interaction with broadcast AR graphics, with a multi-camera spectator camera solution, so that the audience can see the same graphics in the broadcast.

The inspiration for the project started with the Hololens demos by Epic Games and Microsoft. We knew there was huge potential in giving the presenter the ability to not only see AR graphics (instead of standing against a green screen and guessing whilst peering into a tiny monitor) but to interact via gesture and touch, and take advantage of the physics engine in Unreal to recalculate ball trajectories, demonstrate biomechanics and more.