Quidich AR Production Soars to New Heights with AJA KONA 4 and GEN 10
Audience engagement has never been more crucial for sports and entertainment providers than in today’s digital age. With modern consumers favoring personalized, interactive experiences across digital platforms and devices, augmented reality (AR) is quickly emerging as a preferred storytelling tool in the live production community. Ahead of this trend, the technology trailblazers at Quidich Innovation Labs, developed an innovative drone-based AR production solution to service a range of clients across sports and entertainment, from the Indian Premier League to the Men’s Hockey World Cup and beyond. Harnessing industry-standard hardware like the AJA KONA 4 video and audio I/O card, and GEN10 HD/SD sync generator in its system, the Mumbai, India-based outfit delivers memorable, interactive experiences for audiences that generate repeat business among clients.
“Spatio,” the drone-based AR production solution that the team at Quidich developed, allows them to build graphics for live broadcast that can interact with the movement of drone cameras in the air. For each client production, cameras affixed to drones capture aerial footage in 1080i full HD, which is sent to a base station on the ground and then to a studio. There, the video footage is ingested into three workstations using AJA KONA cards, and fed through a Vizrt graphics system, where the Quidich team adds AR effects in real-time to enhance storytelling for the game. The final output is sent to the control room and then directly distributed to audiences across the globe. The AJA Software Development Kit (SDK) allows Spatio to integrate the output into its real-time workflow and the AJA GEN10 provides sync, so that all of the video signals can be genlocked.
