Vizrt Enhances Sports Offering With Unified I/O With Vizrt XR Venue

Vizrt, producer of software-defined visual storytelling tools (#SDVS), today announces the release of its premiere real-time virtual enhancement solution for sports — Vizrt XR Venue. Featuring Viz Arena 5, the XR Venue solution empowers the world’s leading sports broadcasters to enhance valuable content with captivating, state-of-the-art live AR graphics.

With this release, XR Venue enters the IO platform, Vizrt’s backbone for future sports developments. Together with XR Playbook, launched earlier this year, sports solutions now take full advantage of Vizrt’s latest developments for stunning live virtual graphics.

“Using the world’s most advanced real-time virtual graphics, broadcasters are able to deliver an extra layer of excitement and more detail with data-driven graphics that are visually second to none,” said Daniel Url, head of product management, Vizrt Group. “And with the unified IO sports platform, using XR Venue or XR Playbook easily adjusts to changing production requirements.”

Vizrt said the unified IO “offers more flexibility and scalability to produce either upstream at the venue or in a downstream workflow at the studio and a flexible choice of playout — fill and key or a composited video signal for specific production workflows. The output can be added directly on top of the program feed to the mixer as a separate source, which benefits workflows and output quality of high-class productions. In addition, hardware for XR Venue is now consistent with regular Viz Engine hardware, such as the newly certified Dell R7920 for compact setups.

As many major sports events are produced in high-end formats like UHD or HDR, XR Venue embraces these technological advancements in their native formats and supported workflows. Vizrt says this lets producers “create visually engaging representations of data-driven graphics and additional content for any sports coverage in the same high-end quality. The IP based video formats open the door to virtualized and remote production workflows for XR Venue, allowing absolute flexibility and mitigating physical limitations like hardware dependencies or budget restrictions.”