Enhancing Fan Engagement in a 5G Stadium with AI-Based Technologies and
Live Streaming
Abstract
Abstract—It has been tough for the sports industry and the athletes
during the COVID-19 pandemic, but in Taiwan, we have been lucky to
contain the pandemic to a level that we could hold the 2021 National
Intercollegiate Athletic Games (NIAG) in early May. We formed a Sport
Technology Team of more than 30 scholars, students, and engineers to
provide novel systems and solutions that make the athletic games rich of
sport technologies. Some of the features could be the first time shown
to the internet audience for large-scale athletic games. The
technologies involved include table tennis ball trajectory and bounce
distribution, badminton shuttlecock tracking and trajectory, augmented
reality enriched content for real-time video streaming on social
networks, real-time 3D broadcasting with wide-field free viewangle,
in-stadium video stream pushing by private 5G network with Mobile Edge
Computing (MEC), AI-based sport data analytics during live streaming, a
Technology-Enhanced Broadcasting System for sport events, etc. This
paper introduces the respective technologies that we have developed,
deployed, and demonstrated in the 2021 NIAG, Taiwan. We stress the
architecture design and integration of TBS, which is a System of
Systems, as well as experimental results on real athletic games in the
smart stadiums that we have established.