When mainstream events like the Super Bowl draw attention to emerging vision technologies, we sit up and take notice. We're certain a manufacturing-related angle will soon emerge from this technology, because it pushes the frontiers of vision technologies into new arenas. The game was continuously captured up to 30 times per second by video cameras so that all views at the most critical moments could be played back to the viewers giving them a 360 degree birds-eye view of the play.
Virtualized reality is a different beast than virtual reality.
Shape, in a purely virtual world, can be designed with CAD tools since it doesn't have to correspond to a real shape. To virtually model a real event is more difficult, because the model must match the real object exactly. Colour can also be added to virtual scenes by painting each object with virtual paint and then adding lights to the scene. For virtual reproductions of real events the colour must match the real object and the lighting colour. Until the Super Bowl game last January, real moving events had been captured using video camera.