China’s “zero-COVID” policy has placed the Beijing Winter Olympics under some of the strictest coronavirus protocols in the world.
The Games took place in a “closed” environment consisting of entrance “bubble areas” that contained accommodation, event venues and transport links.
There were also no tickets sold to the general public, while many media professionals worked at home due to concerns about COVID.
The conditions are gone Getty Images, the official photo agency for the International Olympic Committee, with reduced support teams on the ground. To address the challenges, the team used robotic cameras and remote editing.
Getty has mounted cameras on robotic platforms that are remotely controlled. This allowed the agency to capture images from angles that a human photographer cannot access, such as inside ice hockey nets or under ski jumps.
“It’s all controlled by software and a joystick – like playing a video game,” Michael Heiman, Global Chief Operating Officer of Getty Images, told TNW.
The robots worked with humans on the ground.
In an ice hockey match Switzerland against Finland, for example, there were two human photographers, and distant cameras above the Olympic logo, overlooking the goal, and inside the net.
Getty has been using remote cameras since the London Olympics in 2012, but Heiman said the early systems were slow and clumsy:
The speed with which the cameras work and the accuracy with which you can control them have greatly improved. When we did that in 2012, the cameras had Ethernet ports on them, but they didn’t have any kind of intelligence built in. It was like taking an expensive robot platform and putting a very expensive camera on it and the two weren’t really meant for each other.
Another new technology for Beijing 2022 was remote live editing. Getty’s software delivered photos via FTP via virtual LAN and on remote editors around the world.
The whole process of sending images from cameras to customers and websites took about 30 seconds.
One technology that could play a bigger role in future Olympics is AI.
Heiman is not yet 100% comfortable with the accuracy of the technology, but expects it to become a useful tool for identifying people in an image.
Face recognition could speed up image text at some events, while number recognition could be used on athletes whose faces are obscured, such as ice hockey players.
The techniques still require human validation at present, but they could prove useful long after the end of the pandemic.
Source
Thomas Macaulay