New BBC Sport Football set

The new Match of the Day/Final Score/Football Focus set is about to launch.

#FootballFocus is back pic.twitter.com/1jvxHPBNNF

— Dan Walker (@mrdanwalker) August 10, 2019

For those who haven’t been following this in Sport thread it’s a fully VR, 360 set based on a stadium.

Thought it was worthy of its own thread.

I think this is either going to be amazing or terrible.

In the immortal words of Dot Cotton: “ooh, I say!”

First impressions: horrible. It may grow on me.

Ooh - talent have shadow/reflections on the floor that match the VR environment. That's smart. Very smart. (That may mean the chroma key is happening in Viz - so it has access to the key. No idea how it works out talent depth - unless they are on fixed marks) Alex Scott's feet weren't perfect - but it's a major improvement over other VR sets I've seen in handling talent.

Sensibly the desk is on a real physical rostrum (like ITV News)

The keying is very clean - but the studio lighting is very flat and looks very 'soft' and a bit 'house light' with no eye sparkle highlights, and no real visible backlight?

The more I see the more impressed I am with how clean the key is. No 'tell tale' hard edges, and hair is very well handled. (Maybe not having any significant backlight helps this?)

Given that they are in a green box - with green reflected light coming at the talent from all directions, the team have done well to minimise the green spill on faces.

I’m not a massive fan, I like Sky’s VR studio because it looks quite convincing. Whereas this BBC studio looks so obviously fake and quite cheap. All for VR studios, but this looks tacky, hopefully they develop it well over time.

Why is there no reflection of the studio set in the desk? The sofa and people in the studio are reflecting in it but looks very odd as there's no reflection of the virtual set - considering they've managed to get reflections on the floor this seems strange as one would assume reflecting the virtual set is a lot easier to do?

I don't have any strong feelings about the majority of the new VR set, but the pitch background is too obviously VR to look good, which is a shame. I wonder if MOTD and other programmes from the set will make use of different backdrops? Last year's World Cup studio with the virtual window onto the pitch looked very good.

I don’t think it looks as nice as the previous set, where you had the best of both worlds with a AR and a really sharp looking physical set. Or even as sharp as the ITV News at Ten set.

Hopefully they’ll tweak it and make it look a lot better.

Grateful for a thread just on this topic – that existing one is quite the mega thread isn’t it? I notice BT Sport changes are buried in it too, I think.

Will look out for the set on a larger device later.

I think it’s missing any animation in the backdrop.

Green screen you say?

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/77066000/jpg/_77066119_90sb.jpg

One initial impression – if the intention is to appear to be in a stadium, then it’s a shame that stadium is empty on match day. Not that they should people in, but maybe something more abstract would not give the same odd feel.