Inside the BBC's 3D World Cup viewer

While updating scores for AIWC26 this week I came across BBC Sport’s 3D World Cup viewer, which launched on 12 June for matches broadcast on the BBC. Every match played so far is sitting there to replay in full, not just the live ones. It’s UK-only, it’s a beta, and somehow this is my second football post in a row, despite still having zero interest in the sport itself. The engineering underneath it is another matter. The viewer is a Unity WebGL build, compiled to WebAssembly and running natively in the browser. The technology comes from XR company Immersiv.io, consuming official FIFA EPTS telemetry, the standardised Electronic Performance and Tracking Systems format developed after IFAB’s 2015 mandate to allow wearable tracking in official matches. Every player’s position and skeletal joint data is captured at 25Hz and streamed to the browser, where the Unity runtime drives character transforms directly from the feed. That’s what makes the first-person view work (the viewer occupies…