SP Grid supports Games of the Future
SP Grid supports Games of the Future
Stage Precision’s SP Grid platform played a central role in the delivery of the latest Games of the Future event, held at the ADNEC Centre in Abu Dhabi. The 10‑day occasion brought together physical and digital competition across multiple “phygital sports” disciplines, including Phygital Fighting, Football and Basketball, alongside VR games and drone racing, staged across eight arenas.
Event technology specialist bright! studios led the integration of systems, content and creative technologies, with SP Grid forming the core control and integration platform. “This was the first time we worked on Games of the Future and the project involved two clients: lead agency, Ethara and the broadcast provider, PLG,” explained Leon Herche, project lead at bright!. “We were hired to handle everything content‑related and to also develop creatives to enhance the overall viewing and gameplay experience, from AR concepts to digital worlds for at‑home viewers to interact with.”
From the design phase onwards, SP Grid’s Grid Studio software was used to connect APIs and data streams into a unified control environment, combining gameplay data, media servers and system processes. Additional onsite support was provided by Stage Precision during deployment.
“Firstly, we used SP Grid for show control of the media playback,” added Herche. “A lot of this was focused on API and data integration with content to display different stats and milestones from the gameplay. In SP Grid, we had data coming in from the games, which were merged, translated and, in turn, triggered Disguise media servers to play relevant content on the screens around the gaming stages.”
Custom user interfaces within SP Grid enabled operators to monitor and act on gameplay data, while built‑in backup switching reduced the need for separate failover systems.
“We were able to show the operators one of the custom UIs we had built in SP Grid to display the data they were interested in, to help them make decisions and instruct the production team during these live gameplay moments,” reported Herche. “The new extensions capabilities in SP Grid meant that even in cases where there were no existing plugins for the integration we needed, our team could code an extension using Python to adapt quickly to changing needs or different hardware. No matter how much planning goes into a production, you’re always going to need to adjust things on the fly. The addition of Python‑scripting programming in SP Grid just extended the platform’s flexibility even further.”
SP Grid was also used to support broadcast elements, including a virtual environment developed by bright! for online audiences, alongside interactive features for streaming platforms.
The team built a city with eight districts to correspond with the different disciplines in Games of the Future. According to Herche, this helped to engage remote viewers, and the broadcasters had the option to use this created universe in different ways between gameplay sequences. The team also used SP Grid to write a data integration that allowed viewers on Twitch to enter a specific command into the Twitch chat to name characters in the content of the virtual districts that was being broadcast.
Augmented reality elements across both virtual and physical competitions were delivered using SP Grid workflows, supported by tracking data and calibration tools.
“The toolkit for AR camera calibration was both effective and accurate in SP Grid, cutting down set‑up time considerably,” concluded Herche. “That was what we found with SP Grid, it just made complex stuff a lot simpler to handle.”
