WATERLOO — Video transport specialist Dejero revealed today Diving Plongeon Canada (DPC) is using Dejero gear to facilitate virtual national and international diving competitions.
The live video solution provided by Pointe-Claire, Que.-based systems integrator Integrated Sports Systems (ISS) uses Dejero’s low-latency EnGo mobile transmitters and WayPoint receivers to allow athletes to compete from different locations, while judges score dives from their homes in real-time. To facilitate virtual scoring, ISS built its proprietary u-Judge system around Dejero’s gear.
DPC successfully tested the solution at a recent national competition involving pools (an example above) in Montreal, Saskatoon, Victoria and Toronto, a one-person production team in Thunder Bay (pictured below), an announcer in Vancouver, a judge controller in Victoria, and international-level judges working from home across Canada.
“During the Covid-19 downtime, Integrated Sports researched creative ways to build a virtual competition that would allow athletes to not only dive in real-time, but to replicate the actual feeling of a live competition against others with immediate scores from judges,” said Jeff Feeney, director of events and communications at DPC, in a press release.
“Low latency is crucial to the sport of diving, and… the Dejero workflow provides the simplicity of receiving high-quality live video, producing a stream and switching right then and there. This technology is going to impact the way we handle national level training camps and competitions going forward, saving us time and travel costs, even beyond Covid-19.”
The big test for the system will be the upcoming “Virtual Nations Challenge”, a transcontinental competition happening April 1-2 involving more than 35 athletes, including the top divers of Great Britain and Canada, all competing in their respective locations at the London Olympic Pool, the Commonwealth Games Pool in Edinburgh, and the Sports Centre at Montreal’s Olympic Park. Divers from Jamaica and South Africa are also competing from the U.K.-based pools they train in. Seven judges across Canada and the U.K. will be submitting their scores virtually as the competition happens.
In Montreal, DPC will display the live production feeds from the EnGo mobile transmitters at each venue onto a large poolside video wall (pictured), allowing the Canadian team to watch their competitors perform in real-time.
The production studio in Thunder Bay (pictured) will centralize the live streams received from the three EnGo mobile transmitters at the poolside locations and deliver them via a WayPoint receiver, with less than a one-second delay, to the judges via ISS’s u-Judge platform. At the same time, live streams will be provided to the public via Vimeo, available through DPC’s website, and recorded for archive.
“There is typically a 20-second delay during the regular streaming of live events, which ruins the experience of diving. Judges like to score a dive every minute, which is why we turned to Dejero to solve this latency problem by showing judges live video of dives via our u-Judge platform, with less than a second delay. Currently, we can stream from up to four different pools simultaneously, but with the help of Dejero, we have our eyes set on more feeds, with the potential to virtualise future competitions including more countries and more competitors, starting as early as May,” said Michael Morris, chief programmer and director of Integrated Sports Systems.
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Images supplied by Dejero.
