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Main photo: Ben Carlin with his Sports Emmy. The inscription reads: 2019 Sports Emmy Awards; Outstanding Digital Innovation; Red Bull Rampage; “Virtual Production”; Red Bull TV; Ben Carlin, Producer. (supplied)<\/em><\/p>\n Having been nominated for an Emmy twice before, Ben Carlin brought it home his third time around.<\/p>\n Carlin is part of a creative technology agency, XR Media Group, that created a virtual production for a live broadcast for Red Bull TV that won a Sports Emmy for outstanding digital innovation.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve worked together for a couple of years,\u201d said Carlin, who\u2019s part owner of the company. \u201cIn the past we were nominated as part of a larger studio, Digital Domain. This time it was with our own company. You\u2019re always named personally on these nominations but winning this one with the startup company that we put together only a year before this project felt gratifying in a pretty major way.\u201d<\/p>\n Brands come to Carlin\u2019s company with a goal or problem they have for a project that they think can be solved with extended reality technology. XR Media Group then works to find a creative solution with advanced technology to accomplish the goal or solve the problem.<\/p>\n This can include creating mobile augmented reality apps, or photogrammetry, which is the process of building 3D models by taking pictures of spaces and stitching them together to create a digital version of a real world object or environment, often for virtual reality applications.<\/p>\n Red Bull Rampage is a mountain biking competition in Utah.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s probably the most famous mountain biking competition in the world,\u201d said Carlin. \u201cIf you\u2019ve ever seen videos online of these mountain bikers just flinging their bodies off of impossibly high cliffs, while also doing back flips and landing it and carrying on and doing it off another cliff, that\u2019s Red Bull Rampage. It\u2019s kind of famous for being crazy. The cool thing about it is that it takes place pretty much in the middle of nowhere near Zion National Park in Utah. The thing about that is that it makes it really difficult for people to get there and actually watch it in person. The size of the crowd they allow is only 2,000 people. The site is covered in rattlesnakes, tarantulas and jagged cliffs. So it\u2019s actually a dangerous place to visit as a pedestrian. Red Bull came to us and said they have an issue with trying to present the scale to people on television. They wanted to present it better and in more of a three dimensional way.<\/p>\n \u201cWe landed on an idea to use augmented reality graphics in the live broadcast, which is kind of like using video game graphics and placing them into the real world. It\u2019s hard to tell looking on TV what the mountain bikers path is and where they\u2019re going because every rider takes a different path. It\u2019s not a typical straight course that has big flags and pylons, it\u2019s just a bunch of dirt,\u201d said Carlin. \u201cIf an athlete was to use a picture of the mountain to describe where they were going to go, they would just take a pencil and draw a line down the picture. We took that simple concept and made a super complicated version using 3D technology. The process started by using photogrammetry to scan the mountain using drones, so a drone flies up and down the mountain and takes hundreds of photographs and we use that to create a highly detailed 3D model that we can work with. From that 3D model we animate the mountain and plot those lines and throw up dust and make it look like the line is being drawn right on the mountain, which gives it some impact and makes it look like it\u2019s in that environment. We can create these little preview animations of the line drawing itself down the rider\u2019s path and going off jumps to show viewers at home what to expect before the rider steps on their bike. Then at the same time we used live camera tracking technology to lay that same line over the mountain in the real world using augmented reality in the live broadcast.\u201d<\/p>\n Or to simplify all of that, Carlin described it as, \u201cWe combined really high end video game graphics with a live broadcast at a sporting event.\u201d<\/p>\n Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the production:<\/p>\n