Genius Sports-owned Second Spectrum revealed the first visuals of its new Dragon tracking system, as part of a presentation to analysts.
While most of the showcase involved products currently on the market, the management team gave its first glimpse of the new technology first publicized as part of a recently announced partnership with the NBA.
“Dragon is going to be the next way of seeing sports,” Second Spectrum co-founder and president Rajiv Maheswaran said from the dais. He added, “The nature of data capture is going to change.”
Dragon is the engine behind the next-generation solution, with so-called “mesh tracking” as its visible output. Current pose and limb tracking captures two- or three-dozen points on each athlete’s body, but the example shown in the presentation collected about 7,000 datapoints — essentially, the entire surface area of the human body, empowering more fluidity of movement and increased realism.
Sitting alongside Maheswaran was Genius Sports CEO Mark Locke, who emphasized that this new iteration of tracking was not cost-prohibitive but, rather, could be “done with super-cheap cameras and some very complicated software.”
In a subsequent telephone interview, Second Spectrum’s chief commercial officer, Mike D’Auria, explained that the real innovation was in the “system architecture” and its ability to capture voluminous more data.
The NBA has signed on to help research and develop Dragon and its mesh tracking. No one is ready to project a timetable for implementation, but when it’s ready, D’Auria said he believes it will represent “a paradigm shift in tracking,” expanding from millions to billions of data points per game.
“That's a foundational layer that's an order of magnitude beyond what exists today or has even been conceived today,” he said.
D’Auria explained that there are two major implications: one the fosters new ways for fans to consume sports, and the other helps league operators and sportsbooks automatically identify game events — anything like passes and shots — for rapid, accurate data collection.
“On its face, that's just more data. You have a bigger pile of numbers to have to grapple with,” he said. “But it, it really lets you do a couple exciting things. One, on any of that 3D recreation virtual world type stuff that you're starting to see more and more, the realisticness and the gap between a data representation and reality just gets much, much smaller because you just have really the true likeness of a human body moving through space there. And the second thing that lets us do really, really well is what we call auto-eventing.”
To date, every major sports league collects data with manual input as part of the process, creating anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds of lag, D’Auria estimated. Auto-eventing would turn that into sub-second latency. That will fuel downstream media and consumer products, such as more customized broadcast options.
While all fans used to receive the same broadcast through linear TV, the advent of digital streaming has enabled more fan choice. Second Spectrum helped pioneer data-driven simulcasts through its ClipperVision product, which offers multiple languages as well as options catered to segments of the audience. ESPN used the underlying technology to help create its Marvel-themed alternate broadcast two years ago. NBA League Pass will now implement Second Spectrum augmentation in its offerings.
“We think the future of sports broadcast is personalized. I think ClipperVision was a huge step in that direction where at times we've delivered multiple different augmented live views,” D’Auria said, mentioning options for deep analysis, playful graphics and the first Kids Cast. “We start to target different segments and show different ways to engage with the game in a live environment.”
It harkens the message that former ESPN and NFL Network CEO Steve Bornstein shared at said at Sports Business Journal’s Dealmakers conference in 2021.
“It is the future, I think, of consumption,’’ Bornstein, now Genius Sports president of North America, said at the time. “I can get pretty philosophical with you on this one. To me, it's going from one-to-many to one-to-one in distribution of sports content. The feed will be customized, and you'll watch the same game I'll see and see different things, based on your interests and priorities, versus what I would see. Second Spectrum will be the vehicle in which it's delivered.”
