Enhancing Fan Engagement in a 5G Stadium with AI-Based Technologies and Live Streaming

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.