Company creates technology for immersive sports viewing

World Today

Semiconductor giant Intel dedicated its drive to digitalized sports by acquiring an Israeli 3-D viewing company in March. The collaboration brings unprecedented 3-D images to home viewers – ultimately it plans to put viewers inside the game.

CCTV’s Stephanie Freid in Tel Aviv has this report.

It’s being called a “sports broadcast revolution”: technology that freezes action, giving viewers a 3-D view of play on the court or field.

It’s called FreeD or Free Dimensional technology. The brains behind the innovation are at Replay Tel Aviv. The rocket scientist, physicist, and graphic designer founders and a team of eighty employees pooled their collective knowledge

Volumetric video, comprised of three dimensional shapes, merges millions of pixels or “voxels” captured by twenty-eight cameras and one virtual camera mounted inside an arena or stadium. It takes sixty seconds to generate the 3-D capture. Intel aims to cut that time to zero, and collaborating on the next cutting edge product

The format would enable at-home viewers to experience games or gaming in virtual, 3-D mode – immersive sports moving the experience from passive to interactive. It’s predicted to be in homes within three years.