30 ESPORTS Weavr Consortium
took place over summer 2019. Weavr’s trial mobile app was shown to a stadium full of fans at ESL One Birmingham 2019, a major Dota 2 tournament and esports confab.
COMPLEX SYSTEMS Florian Block is a University of York
research fellow and lecturer in Interactive Media and Digital Technology (read FEED ’s Genius Interview with Block in our August 2018 issue). His department’s collaboration with ESL has been key to the whole project. “We realised that in order to produce immersive experiences that essentially happen live, we had to use data as a key driver. But that experience also has to be served up with the meat – the video,” Block says. “We knew blending the two technologies together was a perfect means of engaging viewers in a new way.” Block explains the design of Weavr’s data technology workflow: “The data produced by games is ingested into a data pipeline. We’ve got a set of several technologies that interact in tandem that aren’t an integrated system but have clearly defined protocols and intersection. It’s a really complex system. But at the heart we have our internal databus so all the different stakeholders who analyse the data get the data in real time. Then there are various modules that perform AI and statistical analysis on the data in real time as the match happens. These are systems optimised for a real-time scenario. “At the end of it sits what we call a narrative engine. That narrative engine converts interesting findings out of the artificial intelligence and data middleware
WE REALISED THAT IN ORDER TO PRODUCE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES THAT ESSENTIALLY HAPPEN LIVE, WE HAD TO USE DATA AS A KEY DRIVER
interesting performances, achievements, strategic set-ups and certain actions that are the key highlights of the match.” Getting this information-rich viewing experience to work together invisibly in real time is no easy feat. Some elements involve using high performance statistics, but parts are fully powered by AI. For example, neural networks are used to detect simultaneous actions in the game to predict when a highlight moment is going to happen.
AI is also used for detecting different playing styles in order to refine statistics. “In football you have a striker or a goalie,” explains Block, “but in some esports these roles aren’t so clearly defined. What happens is we find different archetypes of play styles and we can then explain to the viewer the significance of different strategies. “It’s a massively challenging and very complex system. It’s got a lot of moving parts. Everything has to work on real-time data. We can’t exhaustively test all the possibilities that could come.” The Weavr Consortium is now looking to head to ESL Hamburg at the end of October to show fans a whole new set of Weavr functionality. “We now have to build out a commercial proposition for Weavr,” says ESL’s James Dean, “forming a legal entity that represents all the work that the consortium has done, for the industry to harness what has been brought to fruition and help IP owners to prosper.” “At the Birmingham demo Weavr actually delivered something that was incredible. Going forward it’s going to be an amazing demonstration of what we believe is one way audiences of the future will engage in live entertainment.”
into what we call ‘stories’. They are essentially connected sets of really
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