Make the invisible visible

For the first time at the America’s Cup in 2024, viewers were able to see the invisible natural engine that helps power the racing yachts. That engine is, of course, the wind, which is made visible by innovative WindSight IQ™ – a technology engineered and designed by teams at Capgemini in partnership with the America’s Cup. 

With the debut of WindSight IQ™, audiences can see exactly where the wind is, how fast it is blowing, and the direction it is coming from – in real time, across the entire race area. This lets viewers understand every decision that is being made aboard the yachts, in the very moments when the crucial maneuvers are being made. The result is the complete transformation of the broadcast experience. 

“There have been plenty of apps out there that track the wind, but they have never done what we wanted, which is to visualise the wind in a small area, such as Barcelona Bay, and show viewers how it varies across the racecourse in real time,” says Mélanie Bras, Design Director at frog, part of Capgemini. 

This innovation means that, effectively, broadcasters and audiences have more insight into the racing conditions than any of the competitors. Achieving it was a hugely complex challenge that brought together the America’s Cup and Capgemini teams with different engineering, data, and design skills. For everyone involved, it was a unique opportunity to work on a truly iconic project. 

“To make the wind visible sounds quite simple, but – from an engineering and science viewpoint – it’s extremely complex,” says Keith Williams, Chief Engineer for WindSight IQ™ at Capgemini. 

“WindSight IQ™ achieves it with sensor technology called LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging. LiDAR uses lasers that bounce off impurities in the air and, from that, we can use complex algorithms to calculate the wind speed and the direction across the whole of the race area.” 
 
The system provides 250,000 wind field data points per second from across the entire course, but with wind conditions changing not just by the day, but by the second, harnessing the data to create a visualisation of the wind remains a constant challenge for the Capgemini and America’s Cup teams. 

“You have to fuse together lots of data,” says Keith. “That’s not easy. Because the data you receive is generated from the natural environment – the local atmosphere – so you get a lot of ‘noise’ and reflections mixed into it. You have to deal with all that complexity within the signals to generate a useful wind field.  

“It’s an example of where your digital modeling hits the physical reality of the real world. To visualise the wind as a ‘wind field’ requires using sophisticated science and mathematical modeling, and a lot of real-time tuning of the LiDAR sensors themselves.”  

From data to visualisation 

Gathering and analyzing data in real time, and engineering the technology to achieve it, was only part of the overall solution that Capgemini needed to design. 

“There was the question of where to actually place the LiDARs in Barcelona Bay,” says Keith, “and then, even when you’ve got your accurate model of the wind field, there’s the challenge of making it understandable to audiences. Some viewers are experts in sailing, while others will be watching it for the first time. The data needs to come to life for each of those audiences.” 

“You can’t think about how to visualise the wind without thinking about the TV broadcast,” says Mélanie. “It has to entertain, and an exciting race is like a good blockbuster movie. The visualisation has to capture the excitement in the buildup to the race, and to show all the different types of race situations that the sailing teams are facing.  

“As a designer, that’s what you’re trying to capture – and we went through lots of iterations to get there. It’s about experiential design and really making sure we can tell the story. How can we make the audience feel the power of the wind and understand the challenges and decisions that the teams on the yacht are making?” 

A winning team 

To guarantee that WindSight IQ™ creates excitement as well as insight, Capgemini’s project team worked across different technologies and skill sets, and with different stakeholders. For example, the WindSight IQ™ technology, combined with a simulator developed by America’s Cup Media, enabled the teams to model the races and predict how different in-race situations would play out and affect the results. 
 
“You’ve got complex physics and computation,” says Keith. “You have the wind and atmospheric conditions changing constantly. There’s the installation and operation of the LiDAR machines. There’s the design aspect, plus the complex integration with all the other broadcast systems and also just learning how to work as part of the America’s Cup team. It’s been amazing to be involved in pulling all of that together to deliver the project. It’s not that often in your career you get the chance to work on an iconic project like this and to really transform the way that millions of people are going to view the event.” 

Because of this, working on a project such as WindSight IQ™ is a career highlight for Mélanie as well. 

“It’s why I work at Capgemini,” she says. “In no other company could I do this kind of project, because the skills you need are so varied – it’s crazy. You all need to come together if you’re to succeed. The project has been a true meeting of different kinds of technology. To me, it embodies the idea that, when you work together, the possibilities are limitless.”