Virtual Eye News

Virtual Eye has returned to Major League Baseball, supplying our data-driven graphics and virtual stadiums to the MLB StatCast 3D product. StatCast 3D can generate high-resolution, data-based visuals that go beyond recent, well-received innovations such as ball and player tracking. Cameras can in essence become virtual, offering a recreation of a sharply hit ground ball from the perspective of the third baseman, the ball, or plenty more. ESPN senior coordinating producer Phil Orlins called StatCast 3D "one of the most revolutionary things that's ever been seen in sports TV."

Virtual Eye Golf continued remote operations on the PGA Tour, delivering our graphics in real-time from our suite in New Zealand to the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit, The Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village GC, the 3M Open in Minneapolis and the WGC FedEx St.Jude Invitational. The European Tour also restarted in late July with the British Masters at Close House, followed by the Hero Open in Birmingham - our UK-based operators were in attendance, providing our tracking and graphics.

Above: broadcast images of StatCast 3D in action

Virtual Eye Golf were in Florida in mid-March, covering the Players Championship on the PGA Tour. All sporting events were suddenly cancelled, and the world went into various forms of COVID-19 lockdown. Virtual Eye's operator teams flew back to New Zealand, and the company began to ponder how to deliver live sports graphics without having operators on the ground.

Two months later, after a hefty investment in hardware and some clever coding, Virtual Eye Golf returned to the relaunched PGA Tour on June 11 for the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Woth, Texas - and our company name couldn't be more appropriate: Onsite computers in America were controlled by our operators here in New Zealand - displaying requested graphics in real-time, over 12000 km from the tournament.

We intend to support the PGA Tour through to the end of the 2020 season, so the same virtual operating was used the following week at the RBC Heritage in South Carolina, at the end of June for the Travelers Championship in Connecticut, and early July at the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit.

In addition to the usual 'Virtual Eye' product using Toptracer ball tracing on tee shots on a 3D model beside the live golfer shot and Virtual Flyovers that also display GolfTrax statistics, we have also introduced 'Virtual Signage' - using Augmented Reality to display statistics 'on' the course. Virtual Eye also helped develop TOURCast for the web and multiple devices, to track the action of golf players playing on the PGA Tour in real-time on an interactive 3D model. https://www.pgatour.com/tourcast/