This project sets out to explore two major factors of virtualising a physical esports event. Firstly, we assess the ways in which production teams can collaborate and work remotely on a live production which includes live broadcast content, collaborative content creation and management of social communication. Esports already pushes the boundaries of live production in terms of efficiencies, challenging existing broadcast workflows and harnessing the very latest in technology. The current situation is certainly challenging this further. We will develop new workflows and systems to allow for an extremely efficient distributed creative workforce in view of adopting newly found efficiencies beyond a lockdown situation. Secondly, we evaluate the behaviours, preferred forms of communication and collaborative activity between groups rather than just singular viewership online in order to replicate the way in which people would attend events and participate together in the physical realm. This specifically looks at the alternative value propositions, exclusive access and influence of live production through collaborative contribution. Gaming audiences already tend to group online particularly to play team based multiplayer games, however, very little has been done around smaller and multiple grouped/team based engagement of live entertainment. We would like to develop new techniques and build on platforms that allow people to group and collaborate online which we believe will initiate new thinking around how people socialise online around specific events. Esports is in a unique position during the current global pandemic situation because we are able to continue operation of the competition online. However, we believe that our learnings throughout this period could be applied to other forms of live entertainment in the future. We have ongoing and immediate access to a large online audience to develop, implement and trial new and innovative techniques over the next few months and beyond. This project also builds on an existing AotF project: Weavr.tv which has been designed to explore ways to engage and interact with audiences through means of cross reality, AI and ML data analysis and personalised narratives. Many of the current and near future developments of Weavr would potentially be also delivered through new techniques we outline in this project plan.

"Esports is the term used for describing video games that are played competitively and watched by massive audiences. In 2017, over 388 million people worldwide watched esports, and the number of esports fans is projected to grow a further 50% by 2020 (Newzoo, 2018). The esports audience, today, truly is an ""audience of the future"" -- esports fans are tech savvy, early adopters and regularly engage with new immersive experiences, such as AR, VR and XR (Nielsen, 2017). Fans are highly social, engaging with each other via chat and social media. The typical esports fan consumes esports broadcast on multiple screens, complementing coverage with statistics and visualisations of game data. In esports, every match ever played is recorded in depth and made publicly available. This project will produce a new platform called WEAVR that leverages the data-rich environment of esports to transform the way esports -- and, further down the line, physical sports -- are experienced by remote audiences. WEAVR envisions immersive experiences for remote audiences that seamlessly stretch across virtual and physical spaces, multiple displays, mobile devices, VR video telepresence and augmented reality overlays, enabling viewers to teleport in between the live arena, virtual game worlds and augmented living rooms. Responding to the fans' eagerness to learn and to become better players, WEAVR will create cross-reality spaces in which fans immerse themselves in high fidelity statistics, visualisations and data-driven stories that give them deep insights into the live match. WEAVR will move away from linear ""one-for-all"" coverage towards hyper-personalised. WEAVR experiences are tailored to each viewer's interests, fully interactive, and provide individualised insights by comparing each viewer's own amateur performance statistics to those of professional players. Viewers will be able to share their individual viewing experiences with other WEAVR users and via social networks in real-time, blurring the boundaries between consuming and creating. WEAVR will integrate large-scale, live audience analytics, enabling this project to generate insight into how audiences of the future engage in immersive experiences, and how this engagement can be exploited commercially. Through a consortium that includes ESL, the largest esports content producer in the world, as well as leading academics and innovators across VR / AR, AI, data-driven content production and broadcast, WEAVR will transform the experiences of millions of esports fans."