COVID-19 forced Riot Games to take the 2020 League of Legends Brazilian Championship (CBLoL) to new heights—the rooftop of the Tower Bridge Building in São Paulo specifically—marking the first time that a LoL match was not held in a gymnasium or arena.
Esports fans have come to expect a certain level of aesthetics for a major league tournament. “We needed the final to look like a final, with all of its intrigue and grandeur,” says Fernando Svevo, broadcast manager at Riot Games in Brazil. “The rooftop filled a piece of that puzzle, but viewers need more to stick around. We kept them locked with real-time graphics.”
Riot Games turned to Ncam Reality, a real-time tracking system that lets productions visualize XR and CG elements in-camera, to create onscreen visuals, including pre- and post-game rundowns on everything from stats and gameplay to predictions of who’s going to win, and effectively capture the attention of 400,000 audience members.
Riot Games did not want to obstruct the stunning cityscape with full-screen graphics, so they used Ncam to preview the graphics in-camera, balancing the visuals and blending AR fireworks, characters, and player graphics into the frame. “No other solution offered that,” explains Svevo. “And because the footprint was low, we were able to employ it without a lot of onsite staff, which helped us maintain protocols without any real tradeoff.”
Among the COVID-19 protocols were daily testing; a layout that allowed for proper social distancing; plexiglass enclosures for the players; and masks, gloves, face shields, and hand sanitizer for everyone involved.
A technical center was built 407' in the air to house the equipment needed to product a tournament from atop a roof. “The remote workflow was pretty much the same as the studio setup,” notes Svevo. “Ncam camera tracking is so flexible, it can track anywhere. We didn’t even need to create external points in the environment – it just worked.” Ncam's computer vision and 3D point clouds made it possible to effectively track without interruption while the dark stage and black rooftop were first illuminated by the sunset and then thrown into darkness as night fell.
“Given everything, we shouldn’t have been able to create an event at this level during the height of COVID; but we did!” concludes Svevo. “It was extremely satisfying to see it come to life, while keeping everyone safe in the process. Plus it’s nice to know that if we ever need to go outside again, we are totally covered.”