APL 2023

Beyond the Green Screen: Running the Broadcast and the AR as One Show

Framed by the press as the biggest Arena of Valor tournament to date, APL 2023 left no margin for a second take. Our brief covered two jobs that usually belong to two vendors. We produced the local broadcast in Thai, and we designed and ran the live AR inside it, for the semi-finals and the grand final at True Icon Hall, ICONSIAM, on 22–23 July 2023.

Owning both sides changed how the show was built. The AR was not graphics laid over someone else’s signal. It was designed into our own program from the start. Camera positions, AR cues and the cut were planned together, so virtual elements stayed locked to the physical stage as the cameras moved. Each AR moment landed on the shot the director had planned for it.

The Tech Stack

Local broadcast

• Production: a producer, technical producer and technical director ran the Thai program, with an instant-replay operator, a broadcast technician and three in-game observers
• Graphics & audio: a CG operator on the broadcast graphics, and an audio engineer on a Midas M32R with Dante
• Talent: a talent manager for the on-air team

Live AR

• Cameras: two tracked broadcast cameras, each with a Fujinon lens encoder
• Camera tracking: MoSys StarTracker reading reflective markers on a client-supplied truss, streaming freeD coordinates into the render engine
• Real-time rendering: two live engines running Pixotope, which renders through Unreal Engine, with AJA KONA 5 video I/O
• Show control: in-house code and data integration for the hero and match data, so one operator could fire AR cues live from a single station
• AR graphics: countdown timer, head-to-head, hero stats, player MVP, team versus, last-pick global ban and ban-pick heroes, with the new heroes prepared for the event

One pipeline, one feed

What does it take to put AR onto a tournament broadcast without a single retake? You treat the broadcast and the AR as one system:

• MoSys StarTracker sent camera position as freeD data into Pixotope
• one operator fired AR cues from our own control station
• the AR layer went into our own program switch, not onto someone else’s output

Because the same team ran both, there was no handover between “the AR vendor” and “the broadcast vendor”. Timing, framing and fixes were all made in one room, in real time.

The result was a local broadcast where AR read as part of the arena rather than an overlay on top of it, delivered live at the scale and stakes of the biggest stage in Arena of Valor.

This project reflects how we approach live esports: broadcast production and real-time graphics planned and run as one pipeline, so the show performs uncompromised under live conditions.