TV Sport Broadcasts: Real Time Virtual Representation in 3D Terrain Models

To enhance the understanding of sports competition broadcast, or to give viewers more information than just images taken from cameras, graphic representations are more intuitive and have greater impact than alpha-numeric information. This paper presents the characteristics and real television broadcast results of a project aimed to improve the understanding of an outdoor sports competition using virtual reality techniques. The system developed does not require any special hardware, which would have made the prototype much more expensive. This goal has been achieved using some new techniques and technological adoptions that are explained in the paper.