Multimedia France Productions - Téléthon 2015 Augmented Reality Tweets

The Téléthon is a two-day charity telethon broadcast on France Télévisions. The production team wanted viewers' tweets to surface on air without cutting to a graphics card, so they asked for the tweets to appear inside a plain board held by people in the studio audience, tracked and composited live.

The application tracked the hand-held board in the studio camera feed, pulled tweets from the Twitter API, and rendered them onto the board in the broadcast signal with the low latency a live show requires. The difficulty was the studio itself: stage lighting changes intensity and colour throughout a show, which is exactly the condition that breaks image tracking tuned on a demo table. A proof of concept was built first to test tracking under live conditions, followed by rehearsals on the real set.

An operator ran the system live for both broadcast days on 4 and 5 December 2015, cueing eight different reveal animations for each tweet, with a manual fallback mode in case the connection to the tweet feed dropped.