How technology helped remote audiences to soak in Roland-Garros culture

Artificial intelligence, video analytics and virtual reality brought alive matches at the French Open tennis to remote audiences

Imagine that you are at work, tackling emails, calls and meetings, and suddenly, you want to catch some tennis action at the French Open. Well, all you need to do is to ask Alexa to enable ‘Roland-Garros 2021’, and you can hear Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic smash and volley on the clay court of Paris’s famous tennis stadium.

But it’s not just that you can hear the players. This year, the Match Centre on the Roland-Garros website and app offers tennis fans the full, sensory, immersive experience of being right there at the courts. The matches, their sights and sounds, and a 3D courtside view have been digitally integrated in the website and the app and artificial intelligence (AI) powered voice assistants deliver commentary and insights, too.

“This year, we wanted to truly bridge the gap between the tournament and its global fans,” says Sumit Virmani, CMO, Infosys.  The Bengaluru-headquartered firm has partnered with Roland-Garros in using technology to reduce the gap between remote fans and the game.

For the second year in a row, the French Open, which is held at Paris's Roland-Garros stadium, has been challenged by the pandemic and social distancing norms. So the French Tennis Federation partnered with Infosys to capture the Grand Slam event for fans, players, and coaches the world over.

Infosys has made this happen by converging technologies like AI, advanced video analytics and virtual reality, all enabled through the integrated Infosys Tennis platform built to power digital experience evolution.

Each stakeholder has been given due importance in the rollout of the technology. For instance, players and coaches can use the RG App that brings quick analysis and replays of the match and player moves in the form of Infosys AI Videos.

“The solution looks at multiple data sources, including the match video feeds, to slice and dice the game across multiple dimensions, making it easy for players and coaches to analyse performance. Coaches can leverage data-driven insights and share tailored and annotated video summaries with the players to support them in the performance analysis,” explained Virmani.

For the media, the AI Highlights solution offers AI-powered video analytics for automated journalistic storytelling. The solution picks the most interesting and dramatic points in the match, using cues such as crowd noise and AI score to arrive at the selection.

Then there is the ‘AI Shot of the day’, which assists the media team in picking the best shot from all the matches played on any given day. The AI-Assisted Journalism solution creates match reports with readily available post-match insights and automatically generated infographics that can be integrated across publishing platforms.

For fans, there is the Match Centre, which features automated crisp text insights delivered using the natural language generation engine for every completed set in a match. “For RG 21, fans can interact with Alexa, and listen to live Roland-Garros Radio or the various podcasts in both English and French,” says Virmani.

That’s not all. The 3D Court Vision delivers interactive experiences for fans by recreating the ball trajectory from the match in a 3D court layout. The trajectories can be watched through multiple perspectives with a configurable camera and also renders key metadata for each shot.

“You could also soak in the Roland-Garros culture and heritage at the 3D Virtual Art Museum. It’s a fantastic way to interact with the legendary posters and artwork from the past four decades,” says Virmani.

Florian Le Moigne, head of digital, Federation Française de Tennis (FFT) said, “Our vision is to become one of the most advanced and digital savvy sports organisations in the world. The pandemic has accelerated this journey for businesses across the board, and it’s no different for us. It gave us the best opportunity to improve the digital experience for all our stakeholders so they get more value from the tournament.”

Virmani adds that what really moved the needle at Roland-Garros was the way they were looking to deliver a fully sensory immersive experience for fans, all at a click or a swipe.