Getting up, close and personal at Super Bowl LI may no longer cost you a year’s salary. For the first time, Super Bowl highlights will be delivered in virtual reality– in near real time.
Fox Sports and virtual reality production company LiveLike VR will broadcast 20 highlights from Super Bowl LI in virtual reality through the Fox Sports VR app. Four highlights each quarter will be uploaded, with four prepared for pre- and post-game. “The touchdowns, the epic plays are what we are going to be looking for,” LiveLike CEO Andre Lorenceau told Digital Trends regarding which plays will be chosen for the highlight package.
LiveLike will have six cameras capturing the game in 4K resolution all around Houston’s NRG Stadium. One camera will be in each end zone, one from the press box view above the field on each 50-yard line, and two cart cameras that will be moving around throughout the game. You will be able to toggle between vantage points in the middle of a highlight by tapping one of the camera icons on the screen. Those with the app installed will get push notifications when new highlights are available to view.
Fox Sports has live-streamed collegiate football games in VR but Super Bowl LI will be its first taste of the NFL. “We’ve never really done real-time highlights, which is a pretty big deal,” LiveLike Chief Business Officer Miheer Walavalkar said. At press time, LiveLike does not know how long it will take to upload the highlights in VR because the company is “on the verge of having a minor breakthrough in cutting our time down significantly” according to Lorenceau.
The NFL has been using highlights to immerse its fans in VR the entire 2016 season. Virtual reality production companies NextVR and Voke VR produced 10-minute VR highlight packages for seven NFL games combined.
To watch Tom Brady’s spirals in virtual reality, you will need to download the free Fox Sports VR app. You will need to sign in with your television provider credentials to watch the highlights. Fox Sports VR can be viewed on Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR; it works with Android and iOS devices. Fox Sports VR also has a “magic window” mode which allows anyone to view the 360-degree footage on their phone, without a VR headset.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?