Camera tracking for the cameras that fly.
Arena gives aerial and cable-suspended broadcast cameras a live 6-DoF pose inside a LiDAR map of the venue — in any orientation, through a full house — and delivers it to your AR graphics backend at field rate. FreeD by default, tailored to your pipeline when you need something else.
| Sensor | LiDAR + IMU, rigid with the camera head |
|---|---|
| Reference | Venue map commissioned with Atlas |
| Output | FreeD at field rate (default) · custom formats on request · genlock / PTP aligned |
| Control | Truck and studio profiles · OSC / Stream Deck · ops UI |
Flying cameras break the usual tricks.
Encoders and fixed-pedestal calibration don't help a camera that is suspended over the field and moving in every axis. Optical tracking struggles with crowds, lighting changes, and look-down angles. A LiDAR map of the venue is indifferent to all of that.
Any orientation
Pointing straight down at the field or across the upper bowl, the tracker localizes against the same venue geometry. There is no "good" direction it needs to face.
Full house, empty map
The venue is mapped when it's quiet. Game day brings fans, sideline staff, and staging; Arena is designed to keep its lock on the permanent structure beneath the change.
Reliability first
Continuous tracking through a broadcast is the requirement. An explicit state machine and a confidence signal tell the graphics operator what they're getting, every frame.
Made for the truck and the studio
Frame-rate-aware delay and trim, saved profiles per truck or studio, a supervised restart path, and a control surface that lives on the tools operators already use.
Map once. Track every event.
Arena consumes a venue map package produced with Atlas during commissioning. On game day it runs one estimator, one clock, and one output.
Venue map package
Parietra or your integrator maps the venue with Atlas and validates it into a package: the map, the tracking sidecar, venue alignment, and a validation report. Broadcast crews never touch a mapper.
One estimator, sampled — never fused
A single high-rate state history is sampled at exactly the output frame time. Delay and trim are applied at the emitter, so they can never disturb the estimator.
Profiles and a control plane
Truck and studio profiles hold the output destination, frame rate, delays, and trims, with an audit trail of who changed what. Bounded trims and slewed changes keep a nudge from becoming a jump on air.
The same tracker that localizes robots.
Arena is a product layer over the Parietra core — the mapping engine, tracking estimator, relocalization, and map store that Atlas ships today. That is why it can be tested against a benchmark suite rather than a demo, and why a venue map is an ordinary Atlas map, not a special artifact.
Arena is in active development.
We're working with FOX Sports to cover the 2026–27 NFL season, qualifying Arena on real venues and real broadcasts. If you operate aerial or cable-suspended cameras and want AR graphics that stay locked, we'd like to talk.