Text / Wang Shuai
Editor / Guo Yang
Halfway through the Paris Olympics, people found that this Olympics was too good to "film".
From surfers flying on the waves of Tahiti, to magnificent fencing under the dome of the Grand Palais, from the sand rows leaping next to the Eiffel Tower, to the elegant archery in front of Les Invalides in Paris...... The France, who are romantic by nature, use the unconventional design of the stadium to make the world realize that "the Olympic Games are more open" is far more than a slogan, but also more possibilities for the Olympic Games to move towards the next century.
The Olympic fencing event is held at the Grand Palais in Paris. Source: AFP
If you want to dream, you might as well be bigger. In another historic innovation, for the first time, the Paris Organising Committee has opened up the public areas within the security lines of the venues to partners for events, which not only provides a richer exposure for the sponsoring brands, but also creates an opportunity for the audience to enjoy a better service and experience. The connotation of an Olympic ticket is greatly expanding from purely watching the game to a more multidimensional interaction.
The results are immediate. From the first day of the Olympic Games, in the Eiffel Tower, Champ de Mars and Les Invalides in Paris, the emergence of a super cool technology made the Olympic fans present feel amazing in the experience, saying that "refreshing their perception of watching the games", and even caused the people of Paris, who are known for their "relaxation", to queue up to experience, and also won a good start for the opening of the Paris Organizing Committee.
The "Alibaba Cloud Olympic Smart Moment" booth is located in the Olympic venues area of three major landmarks in Paris.
This is the "Alibaba Cloud Memento" technology experience exhibition tailored for the Paris Olympic Games, Alibaba Cloud, as the official cloud service partner of the Olympic Games. Here, participants only need to wait for a few seconds in the photo area as instructed, and with the help of Alibaba Cloud's self-developed AI image technology, they can get a "surreal" video that deeply integrates their own image, stadium landmarks, and project actions.
Generate video effects.
This also means that each participant can not only take a "blockbuster" that detonates social media at the landmark venue of the Paris Olympics and realize their "Olympic check-in dream", but also can use AI image technology to obtain limited memories of "competing in the arena" like an Olympic athlete. In addition, the location of the Olympic Games is not fixed, so the "private version" of the Paris Olympics short video can almost be called an exclusive image of the participants, and its significance is self-evident.
Queue situation at the scene.
Not only Tony ·Parker, Wei Qiuyue and Liu Xiang and other domestic and foreign sports celebrities have come to experience it, but Zach King, a "video editing king" with 50 million fans around the world and a top blogger known as "Wizard", also came to Alibaba Cloud for a dream linkage, including many Olympic spectators with limited mobility, and also gained an additional happiness because of "AI warm technology" on the spot.
"Tap water" has set off a boom,
Cool technology makes the Olympics new
According to Zhang Hao, the head of the Cloud Memento project, part of the inspiration for the event came from learning that many Olympic venues, such as the Eiffel Tower, were under temporary construction and would be demolished shortly after the Games. "For every sports fan who travels to Paris from all over the world, it must be a common wish to take a commemorative photo at the iconic Olympic stadium in Paris. However, due to the actual situation, if there is no chance to realize it this time, I am afraid that I will leave regrets."
Therefore, with the power of AI, Alibaba Cloud hopes to help more sports fans realize their dreams and turn the experience into digital images that can be collected and published, so that each participant can not only have "exclusive memories of the Olympic Games", but also share this joy with more people.
Since the opening ceremony, the experience areas of the three venues have received more than 1,000 visitors per day, and nearly 70% of the participants have taken the initiative to post the generated videos on social media, happily showing their "Paris Olympics Moments" to their families and friends. It is precisely because of this "tap water" effect that the event quickly set off a boom in Paris, and there were even scenes of audiences rushing to enter and queuing up to experience it.
From gray-haired seniors to immature teenagers, to cosers dressed as Naruto and die-hard sports fans dressed like Olympic mascots Friger, everyone has a lot to enjoy in Alibaba Cloud's experience zone. Their smiles added joy to the already splendid exhibition area.
The sand pomp field under the Eiffel Tower became popular as early as before the opening ceremony because of a picture of the Paris Olympic Organizing Committee, and it has also become the area with the highest traffic in this event. Tony· Parker, Wei Qiuyue and Liu Xiang all chose to come here, just to see what it was like to play sand volleyball under the tower.
Tony · Parker, Liu Xiang and Wei Qiuyue came to the scene to experience.
And Zach Kings, an Internet celebrity blogger known as the "video editing magician", has played a new trick. He first turned the Eiffel Tower into a pump for volleyball, then chased the jumping ball all the way to complete the check-in, turning the whole of Paris into a playground.
Humanistic care brings surprises,
The warm technology manufacturing with temperature has touched countless people
The Cloud Memento team was most pleasantly surprised by such a group of friends. Because of congenital or acquired reasons, their bodies are inconvenient, and it is precisely because of this that enjoying sports has become their heartfelt desire. Therefore, when they appeared at the event site of Alibaba Cloud and experienced the joy of technology and sports with everyone, the humanistic temperature of the Olympics was once again highlighted.
Recalling their stories, Zhang Hao was deeply touched.
The Invalides in Paris is the venue for the archery event of the Olympic Games, and one of the people who came to experience it was a designer brother. He is 25 years old and has been confined to a wheelchair due to illness, but he is an optimistic and talkative person. After the experience, Zhang Hao asked him how he felt, but the little brother replied to him very solemnly, this is incredible, he never thought that he could "do" the action of archery in his life!
The designer brother was very happy to see his archery video.
Another story takes place in the Champ de Mars. A United States mother and daughter, the daughter was a member of the varsity fencing team and had a bright future, but a car accident caused damage to both legs. She came to Paris this time to cheer for her friends who were selected for the United States national team. And when she saw the moment when she used the judo stunt "Yichi" in the video, she was so excited that she couldn't speak. She told the Alibaba Cloud team that she had almost forgotten what she looked like when she exercised. Now she can see that she has become a judo master, and she is really surprised when she recalls the joy that sports bring her!
The United States girl was pleasantly surprised after the experience.
Such heartwarming stories happen every day in the Alibaba Cloud Experience Zone: a girl with a disease in her right hand can also feel the excitement and excitement brought by archery; The lady in a wheelchair came to the scene for two days in a row, just to check in different items; The boy on crutches saw himself break away from his crutches and smash vigorously......
A woman was present for two days in a row.
These surprises also made the team realize that an interaction that seemed to be just a fun experience could have such extraordinary significance for a special group. This strengthened their determination to make this event perfect. In Alibaba Cloud's view, the so-called cool technology should be people-oriented "warm" technology, and that short but beautiful video is a beautiful footnote to the "Humanities Olympics".
Tailor-made for Olympic fans,
Technological innovation and breakthroughs behind premium experiences
Zhang Peng, the person in charge of the technical side of this event, restored the whole process from photos to videos for us in plain language: the booth that the participants boarded was actually a circular area composed of cameras. The shooting is somewhat similar to "bullet time" in the movie "The Matrix", capturing the three-dimensional image of the participants through 360-degree photography. This image information is then deeply integrated with the sports dynamic model and landmark background in the system to form a complete video picture.
Three-dimensional shooting to reconstruct personal image.
"It takes less than 2 minutes to get a final video on my phone. To complete such a huge calculation and produce results at such a speed is the best in the world."
At present, the biggest difficulty in generating images by AI is actually the "controllability" of the results. In other words, since AI production is an incremental work that "extends less information to more", there is bound to be the possibility of incremental loss of control. You must have seen the weird and outrageous images generated when using AI to convert text to images on various platforms, and you have probably enjoyed some videos where everything is fine one second, and completely falls apart the next. These are all examples of AI computing results that are out of control due to the lack of "constraints" on increments.
AI action migration imposes physical "constraints" on operations.
"But at the event, we can't tell the participants that the generation just failed and that they need to do it all over again. Even for friends with limited mobility, reworking will only make them feel offended, so it's important to make sure it's a success." Zhang Peng said, "There is no fault tolerance for on-site experience, and it is necessary to ensure that the entire participation process is convenient and smooth, and that you can get a 100% accurate result."
In the end, through professional motion capture and manual adjustment, an accurate and camera-like action model was obtained. Through the ReferenceNet module and 2D+3D control signal upgrades, the control of generation actions has been enhanced, and Alibaba Cloud has achieved zero errors in nearly 10,000 experiences. Zhang Peng admitted: "The situation we faced on the scene was far more complicated than we imagined. How to adjust according to each person's body shape, how to restore the rich details of the cosers, and even how to deal with the impact of different weather and lighting on the shooting, every small detail cannot be missed."
The Alibaba Cloud team, which worked tirelessly to make every link perfect, also reaped the joy of the participants' eyes widening with surprise and eagerly uploading videos, "Everything is worth it."
The smiles of the people who experienced it were all over the place.
From enabling broadcasts to creating experiences,
Alibaba Cloud, which "understands" the Olympics, is still evolving
Since officially becoming the official cloud service partner of the Olympic Games in 2017, the Paris Olympic Games has been the fourth large-scale Olympic event of Alibaba Cloud services. Looking back from the perspective of Paris, it is not difficult to find that Alibaba Cloud is embarking on an evolving "digital road to the Olympic Games", from supporting the hosting and broadcasting of the Games on the cloud, to today's more open and innovative viewing experience.
In the digital era, cloud services have become an indispensable technical support for large-scale international events such as the Olympic Games. As the world's leading cloud service brand, after several iterations and upgrades, this year, the cloud usage of the Paris Olympics broadcast surpassed that of traditional satellite broadcast for the first time, becoming the main broadcast method of the Olympic Games. It is expected that 11,000 hours of live footage will be distributed globally through Alibaba Cloud. This is another major technological advance since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics began to be broadcast on satellite television.
In fact, as early as the Tokyo Olympics and the Beijing Winter Olympics, Alibaba Cloud tried to use technology to improve the human temperature of the Olympic venues. In response to special circumstances, Alibaba Cloud has launched the "Olympic Cloud Pin Cloud Pin" social device for global journalists going to Tokyo, following the badge exchange culture, and adding friends on social media with a single touch, so that reporters can "be close to each other" during special times.
Alibaba Cloud's "Olympic Cloud Pin Cloud Pin" device.
Similarly, Alibaba Cloud has also created the "Alibaba Cloud Cloud ME" hologram installation for athletes and volunteers in Beijing, helping them easily get together with their families and friends, so that the Olympics will no longer be "lonely".
"Alibaba Cloud Ju Cloud ME" hologram.
This year's Paris Olympics "Alibaba Cloud Memento" is the first time that Alibaba Cloud's inclusive technology has empowered the on-site viewing experience. In fact, whether it is the intimate service to athletes, journalists, volunteers and other people, or the interesting experience of the Olympic Games for the audience, the use of technology to achieve humanistic care has always been the logical thread running through Alibaba Cloud's support for the Olympic Games. Alibaba Cloud's deep understanding of the relationship between technology and humanity also coincides with the Olympic spirit: the core of science and technology should be human.
The 100th anniversary of the Olympic Games has not only returned to the starting point of Paris, but also come to the node of new changes. "The Olympics are more open", not only the cities and venues are open, but also the ideas and mentality. In other words, the next 100 years of the Olympic Movement must be a better-looking, more fun, more friendly and more inclusive Olympics. The reason why the Olympic Games have become an eternal heritage of human civilization is precisely because it has always been open to all different groups.
Obviously, none of this is possible without the help of a high-quality partner like Alibaba Cloud who "understands" the Olympics. If the strong technical strength is the hardware that Alibaba Cloud can be among the top sequences of the Olympic Games, then the willingness to pour the top technology into each specific person is the soft power that Alibaba Cloud can work hand in hand with the Olympic Games. "Technology is only a means, talent is an end." Look, under the Iron Tower, next to the Invalides, and in front of the Champ de Mars, aren't the bright smiling faces the most "precious" wealth of the Olympic Games?
Using technology to promote the humanistic Olympics, Alibaba Cloud's direction is unswerving. I believe that this exhibition is just a small test, and the future of Milan, Los Angeles, the Alps and the Gold Coast will be ...... What cutting-edge technologies will Alibaba Cloud explore, let's look forward to it together!
※ Unless otherwise marked, the images and materials of the article are from Alibaba Cloud.