RCS played a critical role in Univision’s Elections night broadcast, building not only all the on-screen and video wall graphics, but also managing all the Associated Press data integration, developing a touchscreen application, providing hardware, and creating a set of immersive Augmented Reality graphics. RCS built its own API to populate all the various graphics, as well as a backend data application that allowed Univision producers to manually override the data to set their own projected winners for every presidential, senate, and house of representatives race in the event that differed from the Associated Press’ projections.
The main attraction of Univision’s presentation was their AR graphics, which RCS provided a complete solution for. RCS designed all six of the graphics, built them using Unreal Engine and Pixotope, coordinated with Stype to provide AR camera tracking systems, and developed a custom control application to populate the graphics with data and provide bespoke functionality. While Pixotope had often been used previously for immersive 3D graphics and virtual sets, RCS executed the AR graphics in an innovative way, templatizing the data fields to allow for constantly changing values as voting results rolled in throughout the night.
RCS rounded out its service by providing a robust Viz graphics package featuring over 50 scenes and interfaced Content Pilot templates including a constantly looping lower third ticker, full screens depicting state results and electoral maps, and several sets of video wall scenes for a variety of monitor sizes. Finally, RCS provided Univision with an interactive touchscreen scene which allowed talent to predict which way states would vote, display the results of the Latino candidates, and provide detailed breakdowns of several key states and districts. RCS worked closely with several Univision producers to continually update the touchscreen, insert graphics, and AR scenes to meet their changing needs throughout Election Night and the weeks that followed. Univision came out of Election Night very pleased with the result, winning the ratings battle against their Spanish language competitors.