Disney Star to produce cricket show in metaverse

Disney Star, the official broadcaster for IPL 2022, on Tuesday announced a host of technological innovations for the 15the edition of the tournament. In an industry-first, Disney Star will produce the world’s first interactive cricket show in the metaverse.

The other standout innovations include an association with Dolby to provide a truly remarkable experience with the immersive sound of Dolby Atmos to fans, a unique online voting and polling platform which will make the game more interactive between the commentators and the fans, enhanced analytics in the commentary box, mixed reality analysis, a Behind the Scenes (BTS) technology venture, the famous Cricko, and much more.

Sanjog Gupta, Head – Sports, Disney Star said: “With fans being allowed in the stadium, we wanted viewers to get as close to the real feel of the atmosphere at the venues and this is why we decided to produce the IPL 2022 in Dolby Atmos for the first time. The Star Lab has also enhanced the presentation of the tournament by deploying AR and VR across match coverage and programming initiatives. We will also experiment with the world’s first interactive cricket show in the metaverse, in our ambition of making this the most interactive and immersive season of IPL.”

Cricket fans in India will be able to watch their favourite sporting event, IPL 2022, in Dolby Atmos only on Star Sports1 HD and Star Sports1 Hindi HD. With an immersive experience like no other in Dolby Atmos, viewers will experience multidimensional sound with incredible clarity that allows them to hear details never heard before during the live sporting action.

Other enhancements include ball-by-ball fielding analysis linked to live on-ground player tracking, enabled within digital twins of stadiums as well as 3D player avatars, virtual multi-screen telestration, and a bespoke virtual studio environment that leverages a stereoscopic talent positional tracking system to create the magical illusion that the graphics are real, 3D physical objects.

Disney Star will continue to leverage the power of the unreal gaming engine to create virtual studios and augmented reality graphics. This season, the sky is quite literally the limit for on-ground AR graphics which will be enabled on drone cameras flying high above the stadium. The popular robot statisstant Cricko will return, armed with a huge database of IPL facts and figures to ensure analysts are equipped with the most up-to-date and in-depth statistics to share with audiences. UNI