Delivering Stadium Energy in Every Frame: Cosm’s Immersive Live Sports Platform

In its mission to deliver an immersive experience that brings viewers closer to live sports, Cosm faced an ambitious technological undertaking. The company aimed to create a lifelike and real-time experience of being courtside with unprecedented realism, but it needed to develop a new approach to capture, produce, and play back immersive video at an extraordinary scale. This ambitious goal required pushing the boundaries of visual fidelity and real-time rendering, with a target of 12K+ resolution and a smooth 60 frames per second playback needed to make these immersive experiences nearly indistinguishable from reality.  

At the same time, Cosm recognized the need for a scalable and efficient operational framework to support this endeavor. The immersive media landscape presented limited options for achieving such high-resolution and high-framerate solutions that met Cosm's specific requirements. NVIDIA emerged as a pivotal technology partner, enabling Cosm to reimagine its approach to video workflows across the entire organization.

NVIDIA technologies are used across Cosm’s product portfolio, including Cosm venues, its global network of planetariums and science centers, production operations, C360 Pylon and Ultra capture for linear partners, studio content creation, editing, and virtual reality (VR). 

For Cosm venues, NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition was determined to be the sole solution in the market capable of delivering the requisite computational power to achieve Cosm's objectives. The extraordinary processing capabilities encapsulated within a single video card have unleashed new possibilities for the company's engineers, software users, and content creators, enabling them to work more efficiently with 8K60 video and real-time graphics ranging from 8K60 to 12K60. Cosm’s deployment includes the Dell Pro Max T2 towers and the Dell Precision 7960 rack workstations, both equipped with RTX PRO 6000, providing the hardware foundation necessary to fully leverage NVIDIA’s advanced GPU capabilities across demanding immersive workflows.

On the production front, Cosm has achieved significant advancements in video pipelines, encoding processes, and graphics workflows. These improvements have reduced the complexity of multi-GPU workloads while enhancing visual quality. For the company's technical artists and immersive experience designers, the impact has been substantial, with rendering times for complex projects and upscaling tasks seeing dramatic reductions. 

In the display realm, the augmented power of the NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs has empowered Cosm to manage multiple 8K60 video streams alongside real-time graphics in Unreal Engine and seamlessly display across its expansive LED domes. This technological leap has enabled Cosm to advance its "Shared Reality" platform to new levels of performance and scale.

For Cosm's C360 capture systems and workflows, NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs handle video processing and rendering, stream high-resolution (10.5K) tiled video to the cloud, and offer live and replay delivery to linear broadcast partners. These GPUs also facilitate real-time and replay views within Cosm’s CX Video Hub cloud platform, enabling league and broadcast partners to digitally pan, tilt, and zoom (PTZ) within the180-degree wide field of view coverage each high-resolution C360 capture system achieves. Cosm’s C360 capture systems and CX Video Hub ensure comprehensive, ultra-high-resolution coverage, empowering broadcasters and leagues to swiftly reframe game footage and supply dynamic video content across multiple distribution channels. This has expanded Cosm's ability to distribute immersive content to mediums beyond its LED domes, delivering ultra-high-resolution captured video across channels like cloud platforms, mobile devices, VR headsets, scoreboards, monitors, linear broadcasts, and more.

The adoption of NVIDIA technologies has revolutionized Cosm's production capabilities across multiple dimensions. The company has witnessed substantial time and resource optimization, with developers, technical artists, and experiential designers experiencing multifold reductions in processing time for 8K60 to 12K60 content, significantly decreasing rendering resources and time requirements. 

This has empowered the team to push creative boundaries, incorporating more sophisticated lighting effects, intricate interactive elements, and innovative designs into their graphics. The enhanced GPU performance has not only improved graphic capabilities but also provided additional headroom for managing complex scenes and video workflows, boosting overall productivity. 

From a cost-efficiency perspective, the increased rendering power has enabled Cosm to achieve greater output with fewer dedicated resources, effectively reducing its physical footprint while either maintaining or increasing production capacity with the same hardware infrastructure. With this comprehensive enhancement in performance and efficiency, Cosm is at the forefront of immersive content creation, leveraging its ultra-high-resolution production pipelines and advanced LED dome displays to deliver wraparound, immersive narratives in Shared Reality.

Cosm’s innovations extend far beyond technological milestones, marking the beginning of a new chapter in how audiences experience live events. By pioneering a new format of immersive media—Shared Reality—Cosm has melded the physical and virtual realms, creating the most lifelike immersive experience conceivable. Integrated with NVIDIA infrastructure, Cosm’s Shared Reality technology is fulfilling its long-standing promise of bringing fans the electrifying atmosphere of the arena and transporting them to the best seat in the house across more than 400 live games each year. Cosm’s Shared Reality platform has created an entirely new category in how the world experiences live sports and entertainment.