Radically enhancing the spectator experience at public events

The Problem

Spectators at large-scale live events tend to have a poor experience, often due to their location because they can't see all of the action from their viewpoint, and the lack of information and personalised content.  Large-scale public media-centric events are now common-place for example, the World Rally Championship, Formula One, the Olympic Games, Glastonbury and the British Open. Typically such events deploy a huge infrastructure of production and transmission equipment with many fixed and portable cameras. Most of the content is never made available to local spectators except through a single feed of edited output to portable TVs or large screen displays.

The objective of VISUALISE is to provide an enhanced experience for spectators at events through local area access to a rich range of media via hand-held devices. This will include action taking place out of sight, archive material and real-times statistics. For example, spectators at the World Rally Championship would be able to experience all the key events even when these occurred many hundreds of miles away. They are also able to follow a team or an individual's performance (using live timing, live GPS tracking and live video at selected locations).

The Goals  

• To develop video compression and streaming techniques that work effectively with low coast wireless broadband networks.
• To integrate fixed (service park and trackside) and mobile (in-car) cameras into a live-viewing infrastructure.
• To develop enhanced spectator interactive using standard mobile terminals (i.e. mobile phones and PDAs).
• To integrate live timing and GPS data in a seamless Visualise interface.
• To analyse live timing and enhance the performance of current (WiFi and HSPA) and emerging (WiMAX and LTE) wireless techniques.
• To allow rapid planning and deployment of networks through the exploitation if advanced propagation modelling tools.
• To provide content management, distribution and integration with the existing broadcast infrastructure.
• To develop a demonstrator, hosted by ISC (International Sportsworld Communicators) at the UK stages of the 2006 and 2007 World Rally Championship.
• To investigate business cases and charging models.

The First Trial

VISUALISE provided wireless hotspot coverage in the hospitality area at Walter’s Arena in the Rheola 2 stage on Friday 1 December 2006.  This enabled spectators using wireless handheld devices to access the service comprising live local video feeds, remote feeds from the Swansea Service Area, WRC statistics and results service, archive material, together with Team, Driver and Stage information.  This has never been done before and was successfully completed and acknowledged by guests as achieving its goals.  Multicast coverage was successfully achieved within the hospitality tent at Walter’s Arena with a range up to 40m with limited drop-out

The trial also included a measurement exercise which formally evaluated the performance of the network and explored range extension potential through the use of enhanced and directional antennas. Data logging was also conducted to enable comparison of error performance with predictions for a range of network parameter configurations.