The Australian Open tennis tournament finished up last night, and viewers of 2025’s first Grand Slam tournament may have noticed something strange on the tournament’s YouTube channel: the players were represented as Nintendo Wii-like characters.
The Australian Open recreated the tennis matches live in video game form overdubbing the real sound of the games. The technology is powered by artificial intelligence, which sees athletes wearing the correct outfits with the right colors. Tennis Australia created its own “skins” to represent players, ball kids, and chair umpires. The stream is almost live with roughly a one-point delay.
The Australian Open doesn’t have full
broadcast rights for all matches. So, its YouTube livestream uses AI to generate Nintendo Wii Tennis cartoon avatars that mimics the action on a 2-minute delay. As a result, this animated clip of Daniel Medvedev smashing his tennis racket… pic.twitter.com/VGVlteA4Rx — Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) January 16, 2025
“The wonderful part of it is it’s the players’ actual movement. It’s the actual trajectory of the ball,” Machar Reid, Tennis Australia’s director of innovation, tells The Associated Press. “We’re taking the real into the unreal. That’s part of the magic.”
While the broadcast is certainly a novelty, it is not purely about entertainment. Since the Australian Open sells broadcast rights to its competition all across the world, showing it live on YouTube would undermine those deals. So, the Nintendo Wii characters are a kind of workaround so it can still be streamed live, sort of, on YouTube.
“By integrating skeletal tracking data with animated characters, this mixed-reality experience is designed to captivate a new generation of tennis fans, making the sport more accessible and engaging, particularly for kids and families,” says the Australian Open in a statement.
Similar technology has also been used by the NFL, NBA, and NHL. Vice suggests that this technology could be used in other sports such as motor racing. “A live streamed Formula 1 race that looks like Mario Kart, I would be so down for,” writes Matt Jancer.