SINGAPORE: During the initial games of the World chess Championship, the boffins in charge of the broadcast had an idea. D Gukesh had this habit of closing his eyes when the games were on so they wanted to put out a niche statistic to the watching world.
They called it 'focus flow'. "Total time spent with eyes closed during the game". A two-member team came up with it. It was given the go-ahead. A day later, this particular graphic was aired.
How did FIDE plan, dot the i's and cross the t's and execute everything within a 24-hour window? The short answer? AI cameras.
The long answer? Here's Lennart Ootes, one of the five taking care of the broadcast at this year's final between D Gukesh and Ding Liren. "It (focus flow) wasn't part of the original plan," he says. "We decided to do it on the fly.
"We are a team of five people. Two of them worked on this and they were fast. They not only came up with the plan but also executed it within a day."
Two cameras are positioned on either end of the chessboard, directly looking into both players' eyes. These are the ones directly responsible for picking up 'focus flow'. When Gukesh or Liren close their eyes, these cameras send a message to a running AI programme in the broadcast room.
Ootes and his team look at the numbers and percentages and bring up the graphics on the screen if they find it interesting. It's immersive but not intrusive broadcasting.
Ootes picks up the story. "We saw with Gukesh that he tends to keep his eyes closed for a long time. So what we did was we fed the camera a few images... 'this means eyes closed, this means eyes open'. The AI, in turn, learns this. That's the power of AI," the Dutchman smiles. They have had AI cameras before but this is the first time they have had AI giving them data with respect to focus flow.
They similarly trained the cameras to track player moments (when they are sitting in the chair or when they are not sitting). "The AI doesn't understand what a face is but it understands if someone is sitting in the chair," he says. "Basically what you need is... in the case of the chair, is someone sitting? We gave all kinds of images to the computer -- images of people sitting and images of an empty chair. The algorithm is self-learning. Based on the real-time images it sees, it detects if someone is sitting or not."
This is by far the most number of cameras FIDE has had for the final. "We had less cameras in the previous one at Astana. This is I think the most cameras ever used at the World Championship match," Ootes says.
Where are the cameras positioned?
A camera each between the king and queen on either side (specifically to track the players' eyes)
One on the ceiling for FIDE's silent stream
Two mounted cameras on the table for a more side-on view
One next to the glass wall to get a shot of both players in one frame
A camera fixed on the clock
Two for player close-ups
Gukesh on why he keeps his eyes closed:
“It’s just something I usually do during games. Sometimes, closing my eyes helps me focus better and calculate more effectively. For me, it’s quite normal.”
