Camera tracking for the cameras that fly — and the stages that can't wait.
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, in the format your graphics pipeline expects. The same markerless tracker serves virtual production: no markers on the ceiling, no constellation to survey, set up in minutes.
| Sensor | LiDAR + IMU, rigid with the camera head |
|---|---|
| Reference | Venue or stage map captured with Atlas — no markers, no constellation |
| Output | Pose at field rate · standard camera-tracking protocols or custom formats · 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 tracking through all of it.
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.
Markerless tracking for the stage.
Marker-based and constellation trackers need the ceiling dressed, the volume surveyed, and a recalibration every time the set moves. Arena tracks against a LiDAR map of the stage itself — walls, grid, floor, set pieces — so there is nothing to install, nothing to survey, and nothing that drifts when the lights change.
Markerless
No reflective markers, no active LED constellation, no line-of-sight to a ceiling rig. The stage geometry is the reference, and it is already there.
Set up in minutes
Walk the stage once with the sensor to capture the map, mount the sensor on the camera, and track. A redress is a quick re-scan, not a re-survey.
Any camera, any move
Jib, crane, dolly, Steadicam, or handheld: a rigid LiDAR + IMU head on the camera gives a 6-DoF pose in any orientation, including look-down and look-up angles.
Same output, same discipline
Pose at frame rate, genlock / PTP aligned, with the delay, trim, and confidence signal the broadcast side runs on. Custom formats on request.
Map once. Track every event.
Arena consumes a venue or stage map package produced with Atlas during commissioning. On game day or shoot day it runs as a single tracking pipeline: one clock, 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.
High-rate pose estimator
Output tuned to broadcast rates, with full control over alignment, delays, and trims.
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 the third Parietra Studio product, alongside Atlas and Explorer, built on the same 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 on air.
Arena is in live production for America's favorite sport every week during the season. If you operate aerial or cable-suspended cameras, or run a virtual production stage and want markerless tracking that sets up in minutes, we'd like to talk.