Longtime client Golf Channel upped the ante for its coverage of the Arnold Palmer Invitational March 19-22 with innovative augmented reality (AR) graphics brought to life by our team here at RCS. Working closely with NBC’s creative services department, we designed 3D graphics for tournament programming across Golf Channel and NBC, and for Golf Channel’s “Spotlight” coverage. The graphics included a leaderboard, promos, course description, pop-up scores, hole results and more. To make each graphic appear as part of the Bay Hill Golf Course in Orlando, FL, we implemented a custom AR workflow, which locked the graphics to real-time camera movements.
Our team built the solution on the 17th hole, which included Vizrt’s Viz Trio for graphics control, a Viz Engine for rendering and an Ncam system attached to Golf Channel’s camera to track graphics in real-time. An RCS programmer also devised a custom script to interface with PGA’s ShotLink statistics system to display real-time stats in the leaderboard graphic. RCS’ team was on-site to make subtle changes and create custom graphics on the fly.