The World Cup in 3D: Through the players’ eyes, football’s latest attempt at immersion has its moments

A 3D recreation of England vs Ghana at the World Cup

Harry Kane blazes over the bar, as seen through the virtual eyes of a Ghanaian BBC Sport

By Adam HurreyJune 24, 2026 7:00 am EDT Updated

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Stadio San Nicola, Bari, June 9, 1990. The Soviet Union have started brightly in their opening game of the World Cup against Romania and have a free kick, 25 yards from goal. Oleh Kuznetsov’s dummied run-up leaves the ball for Oleh Protasov to drill one, but it’s a tame effort that somehow dribbles through the Romanian wall for Silviu Lung to save comfortably down to his right.

What happens next is, for the time, groundbreaking. The Soviet broadcaster has something unprecedented up its sleeve: a virtual, three-dimensional replay.

Soviet TV's virtual replay, 1990 World CupAdam Hurrey

The simulated free kick is, in hindsight, a bit pathetic. The (presumably warehouse-sized) Cold War-era supercomputer has managed to make Protasov look like he’s playing in stilettos, but also revealed that the referee hasn’t done his job.

“The wall, you can literally see it clearly now, how poorly it was placed,” complains the Soviet commentator. “Well, not really a wall, but, you know, a flimsy little fence, where there were gaps. Then this distance to the wall, that’s what shows the referee’s mistake. He’s obliged to (make it) nine metres but there were only eight. So, electronics help to convince not only the players of their mistakes, but also the referees.”

Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, June 16, 2026. Against Norway, Iraq goalkeeper Jalal Hassan is about to discover in the flesh that — to reboot Jorge Valdano’s superb line about Brazilian striker Ronaldo — Erling Haaland is not a man, he’s a herd. Hassan hesitates over an undercooked backpass, Haaland smells blood, and Iraq are toast.

At first sight on TV, this was, at worst, a mid-level goalkeeping calamity; at best, an occupational hazard for a ball-playing goalkeeper in the 2020s. But this World Cup has more angles than ever before. In fact, it has all of them.

POV: Haaland’s tearing down on you 😳

Enjoy BBC matches in this 3D space from any camera angle or any player’s POV 👀

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— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) June 17, 2026

For the first time, all of the matches in this tournament can be watched in full via the BBC’s World Cup 3D Experience.

“It hasn’t been really heavily promoted just before the World Cup because the BBC was still waiting to see how people reacted to it,” says Emmanuelle Roger, co-founder and CEO of immersiv.io, a Paris-based augmented reality (AR) development company. Roger is explaining to The Athletic how their white-label 3D platform — licensed for use by the BBC — recreates the action in near real-time.

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If the BBC really was tentative about shouting about it, they needn’t have been. People are loving it. Or, at least, finding it highly entertaining for unintended reasons. In the first week of the tournament, the BBC says that the World Cup 3D Experience was used more than a million times.

For anyone familiar with the strides made in football video games in recent years, the surface-level realism of the graphics might well underwhelm. But that’s not the objective here — after all, you can just watch the game for real if you want, and you probably are. What immediately strikes you as you play around with the 3D tool, though, is the faithfulness of the players’ movement. This fine-motor accuracy — the backswing of a leg for a five-yard pass, the twist of a body as it goes to ground, Youri Tielemans throwing his arms up in the air in exasperation when his pass isn’t latched onto by Romelu Lukaku — is born of pure data.

A clip from the BBC's 3D match experience shows a referee and an Austrian player in conversation after Argentina appeal for a penalty

Austrian protestations against Argentina, as seen from through virtual eyes on the pitch (BBC Sport)

And FIFA adores data. The information it gathers from World Cup games is as granular as, for example, counting a player’s “offers to receive” (what an old-school football person might term “calling for the ball”), a welcome collision of footballing body language with the data era.

The BBC’s 3D virtual environment for each of the World Cup matches relies on data gathered by the technology already in place for the semi-automated offside system. At each game, around 30 cameras — running at 100 frames per second — are deployed to track the precise location and movement of the players and ball. The 22 bodies (plus the referee’s) generate thousands of data points as they go about their business. That skeletal tracking data, Roger says, is captured by FIFA and ingested by immersiv.io’s 3D platform “multiple times per second”.

During a live game, or revisiting it later, BBC website users can follow this virtual version of the action from various vantage points: the traditional broadcast view (the unadventurous choice), a bird’s-eye tactical view (for those who use their Athletic subscription to read about ‘rest defence’), a third-person view of any chosen player (the go-to option for the casual 3D dabbler) or a first-person view, directly through that player’s eyes.

Back in a virtual Foxborough, the eyes of Iraqi goalkeeper Hassan — before, during and after Haaland had brutally dispossessed him in his own six-yard box — tell quite the story. First, we join him in seeing Haaland rampage into view at a top speed of 32 kilometres per hour, then Haaland skipping gleefully away as the ball ricochets into the goal and then, as Hassan looks on in dazed disbelief, Haaland disappearing into the distance to celebrate.

A first-person 3D view shows Erling Haaland running away in celebration after scoring againsst Iraq

(BBC Sport)

There is a profound helplessness to that forlorn glance that the main broadcast could never capture.

The World Cup 3D Experience represents the latest step in the modern search for sporting immersion, a distinctly stop-start journey that has taken in Sky Sports’ doomed attempt to make watching Premier League football in 3D glasses a thing in the early 2010s; venues like Cosm in Los Angeles, with colossal 8K screens that attempt to replicate the real-life spectator experience, only with bloody marys and avocado toast; and most latterly ‘ref cam’, which offers TV viewers a weirdly claustrophobic referee’s perspective amid the midfield maelstrom.

Broadcasters Andy Gray and Richard Keys pictured wearing 3D glasses as they promote Sky Sports 3D in 2010

Dark glasses at work — Andy Gray and Richard Keys launch Sky Sports’ 3D offering in 2010 (Sky Sports)

“We come from the fan-engagement market,” says Roger, who co-founded immersiv.io 10 years ago with Stephane Guerin. “And our vision was that, with 3D recreation, you can basically be anywhere on the pitch and choose the angle you’d like, angles you can’t have on TV. The beauty of this is that you can be in control.”

As the skeletal tracking data has only been available for a couple of years (the 3D system was first rolled out during last summer’s Club World Cup), immersiv.io’s vision seems far from fully realised. Would you actually want to watch a whole game like this? In truth, the crowdless setting (limb-tracking, as yet, is not capable of handling 60,000 fans, and we should fear the day that it can), the blank expressions of the players and general lack of aesthetic texture — not to mention that the feed is around 30 seconds behind the live action — make this version a second-screen option.

But my curiosity is piqued. During each game, I often find myself wondering how certain incidents might look from the intimate perspectives of those involved. Not for advanced tactical reasons, of course, but merely to watch referee Felix Zwayer have his stoppage-time cramp relieved by Australia midfielder Aiden O’Neill:

A 3D first-person video clip shows referee Felix Zwayer falling to the ground with cramp

(The referees, incidentally, do not have the likenesses of FIFA’s real-life officials. The generic male referee looks like a polite hotel receptionist who, yes, of course, will be happy to call you a taxi to the airport, while the female version looks suspiciously similar to Roger herself, although it feels too rude to accuse her, especially via a Zoom call, of such rampant, rank-pulling AR egotism.)

Enthusiasts of elite-level midfield scanning can get dizzy by occupying Pedri’s body, Bruno Fernandes can unwittingly take us behind the scenes of his relentless refereeing feedback and the anti-hydration-break brigade can take some pleasure in the fact that the limb-tracking technology simply cannot handle lots of players bunched together in the same place (resulting in unnerving glitches that cause the players to clamber over each other like impatient zombies.)

There are moments, though, for which the immersive quality feels more than adequate. Take, for example, Joao Neves’ towering header for Portugal against DR Congo, where your footballing brain allows you to almost feel your neck twist and the ball skim off your own forehead…

A 3D first-person video clip depicts Joao Neves heading home the ball against DR Congo

… and what could be a more human way of experiencing the slightly-below-average penalty taker Lionel Messi reminding us that he is human than seeing his missed penalty against Austria through his own eyes?

A 3D first-person video clip depicts Lionel Messi firing a penalty wide of the goal in Argentina's win over Austria

Meanwhile, in a dystopian scenario for those who make a hobby of bemoaning VAR decisions being dictated “from a bunker in an industrial park 50 miles away”, could this virtual 3D world be used to get the best possible view of a borderline penalty decision? I refer myself to Sadio Mane’s high-risk lunge on Kylian Mbappe at MetLife Stadium…

A 3D first-person video clip depicts Saido Mane's challenge on Kylian Mbappe during France's win over Senegal

…and reach no firm conclusion.

Is this the future? How immersed do football fans really want to be? This World Cup innovation is merely testing those waters, but Roger anticipates several more gears for this to move into. “In the future, we won’t use the 3D recreation. We’ll have a 3D video, so to speak — it won’t be just a virtual recreation of the players, but more like volumetric video.”

In other words, a Matrix-style ability to freeze time and navigate around a real-life broadcast of the game. Now we’re in the future.

Before that, how long before the attention-trapping potential of this falls within the gravitational pull of the Premier League and Champions League’s content universes? Roger won’t comment on that but, 36 years on from the Soviets and their clunky TV trailblazing, we are now all — in the loosest, most virtual sense — World Cup participants.