In a live broadcasting facility, the heart of the station is the control room, or gallery, as it is called. The gallery contains all the physical equipment needed to produce a programme. This equipment can include monitor banks made up of many screens, audio monitors, visual and audio mixing desks, talkback systems, remote camera control panels and media servers. This equipment is expensive to maintain and hard to reconfigure. When broadcasting on-location (i.e. outside of the main studio facility) an outside broadcast (OB) truck is traditionally utilised. These trucks cost millions of Euros to operate and are not environmentally friendly. XR technology has been utilised within sports broadcasting in the form of virtual production. However, the industry has been slow to adopt HMDs into their workflows. With the evolution of XR technology, in particular HMDs, perhaps there is an opportunity to re-assess the traditional gallery workflow and introduce some new ways of working.
The motivation behind the current research is to investigate the potential for HMD-based solutions in live broadcasting. Our goals in presenting the PoCs at IBC were to gather feedback from industry professionals on the feasibility of working in this way. We also wanted to gain insights into the implications of using HMDs in a professional context. The research questions we explored are:
- What possibilities would HMD-based workflows enable in a live broadcast?
- Could HMD-based solutions provide benefits to the live broadcast industry?
- How could XR technology be integrated into existing workflows?
As part of the IBC Accelerator program, the Gallery Agnostic Live Media Production project consortium (Fig.1) identified a core workflow that could be implemented across many different devices and many locations. The workflow involved utilising cloud-based production tools from the project participants. This allowed the user to organise media items into a schedule called the rundown. The rundown was then shared with another tool called an automator. This is responsible for syncing graphics, video and sound. The user was able to trigger media segments in the automator and see a preview of the media segment alongside the segment being currently broadcast. These tools were visualised in virtual space on floating monitors. The user was able to interact with the virtual screens through physical control of a keyboard (Fig. 2), using a phone as a pointer (Fig. 3) and through hand-tracking (Fig. 4). Three XR HMDs were employed; a Meta Quest Pro, XReal Light glasses and a Microsoft Hololens 2.
At the event, the PoCs were presented to professional users. After each demo, rapid interviews were carried out with each participant’s response recorded using a handheld digital audio recorder. 30 participants were interviewed, representing multiple roles and perspectives within the industry. After the event, a thematic analysis of the interviews was conducted which produced 10 relevant themes:
- Integration of XR in broadcast processes
- Environmental impact and sustainability
- Challenges and limitations of XR
- Future potential and development needs
- Specific applications in broadcasting
- Digital transformation and industry evolution
- Role-specific perspectives
- Practicality and user experience
- Technological innovation and trends
- Industry collaboration and standards
The analysis found that there is significant interest and potential for XR technologies in the broadcast industry. However, user comfort and practicality are the main barriers to adoption. There are potential benefits in terms of sustainability and the enhancement of production workflows.
There is much work to be done in this area before the integration of HMD-based workflows can be fully assessed. Longitudinal studies on the effects of HMD usage should be carried out to assess the health implications of wearing these devices for prolonged periods of time. The scalability of the proposed solutions within different broadcast environments is also not fully understood. A detailed economic analysis of the effects of integrating these solutions into the workflows would also benefit the industry and provide important knowledge for organisations who are interested in exploring these technologies. The research carried out here has provided the foundation for a new IBC Accelerator project, Evolution of the Control Room, which will be presented at IBC ‘24.
Integrating Head Mounted Displays into Live Broadcasting Workflows: Implications and Possibilities from an Industry Perspective was written by Bryan Dunphy, Gareth W. Young, Grace Dinan and Niall Murray. It was presented at the first Interaction and Storytelling with(in) Immersive Media (ISIM) workshop, as part of IMX ‘24 on the 12th of June 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden. This paper investigates the current attitude within the broadcast industry toward HMD-based production solutions. Several proof of concept (PoC) demos that were exhibited at IBC ‘23. These demos consisted of utilising a range of head mounted displays (HMDs) to visualise a live broadcast workflow. They also involved several different modes of interaction. The participants were interviewed after each demo. Their responses were recorded to provide a snapshot of current industry opinion on the potential of integrating HMD-based solutions into their workflows.
Authors: Bryan Dunphy, Gareth W. Young, Grace Dinan and Niall Murray from TUS – Technological University of the Shannon