A reoccurring complaint when it comes to eSports broadcasts has been the way various games— whether they be League of Legends, CS:GO, or Halo—choose to broadcast their gameplay footage.
While people familiar with the camera constraints of these games might be comfortable with these restrictions, it’s not necessarily the best way to translate what’s going on for new viewers who aren’t familiar with the intricacies of a given eSport.
Different developers have been experimenting with mixing up how they broadcast gameplay footage, but the developers at Stunlock Studios and Coffee Stain Studios have come up with a particularly intriguing solution.
As seen in the video above, Stunlock and Coffee Stain have cooked up VR implementation for their new team arena brawler Battlerite. The VR spectator mode is similar to what we’ve already seen in games like DOTA 2, but the more intriguing feature is the built-in VR broadcast mode they plan to implement with their game.
You can view the footage starting at 2:23, which shows off a broadcaster in VR using the HTC Vive’s roomscale feature to move their body around the game’s battlefield, angling the camera for shots that aren’t available from the player’s perspective.
Two camera operators are even able to record the same scene at once, which can be fed into a live switchboard to create a broadcast similar to the kind used for soccer or baseball.
It’s a solution that would require some fine-tuning, as many games would have to make sure their models and animation are designed to be viewable from any angle in VR. But the possibility of dropping physical camera operators into eSports broadcasts (or any notable game broadcast, really) is an exciting possibility.
For more on another intriguing way to integrate Twitch and virtual reality footage, be sure to read about Fantastic Contraption’s new mixed reality and Twitch chat functions.
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2016