28 ESPORTS Weavr Consortium
Weavr Consortium is a UK-funded project using data and AI to make esports a fully immersive experience WEAVR OF DREAMS Words by Elsie Crampton
ata is the heart of esports. Video games themselves are literally no more than a visualisation of data manipulated in real time by
and traditional sports. The aim is to create a kind of data-driven entertainment with greater commercial opportunities for brands and teams and a much more immersive, interactive experience for viewers. ESL, the largest esports organisation in the world, has been at the centre of the Weavr project which kicked off in January of this year. The company had been collaborating for some time with researchers at the UK’s University of York, experimenting with using AI to improve the storytelling at ESL tournaments. “It was cutting-edge stuff at the time. The industry hadn’t seen this sort of thing
before,” says James Dean, ESL UK CEO. “Suddenly out pops this opportunity to bid for some funding as part of the Audience of the Future programme.” The Audience of the Future initiative, run by of UK’s Department of Digital, Culture, Media, & Sport (DCMS), aims to bring creative businesses, researchers and tech experts together to create new types of storytelling, with an aim to make the UK more competitive in content creation and development internationally and to create experiences that are culturally impactful. Out of a total of £33 million available for research, £16 million was to be split between four “demonstator” projects in four categories, one of which was sports. ESL put forward its Weavr concept. “Lo and behold, we won it. We at ESL had never actually won any funding before – or even applied for it, for that matter. Although the University of York was quite attuned to the process.”
humans. A new UK tech collaboration, the Weavr Consortium, aims to take the mass of data embedded in esports and create a new way of viewing competitive content. Weavr is a collaboration between six UK companies with expertise in esports, education and entertainment, supported by a grant from UK Research and Innovation. The Weavr platform uses live and historic game data to create mixed- reality experiences for fans of both esports
IT’S A MASSIVELY CHALLENGING AND VERY COMPLEX SYSTEM. IT’S GOT A LOT OFMOVING PARTS
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