Brainstorm, leading manufacturer of real-time 3D graphics and virtual studio solutions, announces at IBC the new version 6 of Aston, the company’s real-time 2D/3D motion graphics solution. With the new version, Aston receives dedicated features for Esports and Weather, that will strongly enhance the capabilities of the system, on top of a built-in touch screen generator that vastly improves its capabilities of generating interactive content for on-air applications.

Aston 6 features a built-in toolset to create interactive projects that can be used with a touch screen. This toolset permits the creation of specific buttons to trigger actions, and supports multi-touch gestures, which allows for creating interactive projects that can be used while in production by presenters, on screen.

AstonWeather now includes new possibilities for manual creation of weather maps, so meteorologists can use any of the available templates and forms to custom build their own maps. These possibilities include the ability to create customized maps using a drag & drop interface with built-in forms, adding in icons and textures that can be combined with pre-built animations of isobars and satellite images to create the weather maps as required. AstonWeather also includes new data sources such as Aemet, Avamet, GFX or MetraWeather for automated data retrieval and animations, and shows the ability to present the graphics in a real or virtual scene, improving the interaction with the presenters.

With the growing interest in Esports, Aston takes advantage of Brainstorm’s advanced API to allow direct connection to videogames. This connection makes full data interchange between games and the Aston templates possible, so any data or statistic can be instantly transferred to an Aston template, that can be displayed on screen or as an augmented reality object within a real or virtual scene. Esports online or broadcasted shows can now take advantage of high-end graphics, charts, statistics and AR elements as any other Sports broadcast.

Brainstorm will also showcase an initial integration with Epic Games’ Avalanche project, which will benefit from the decades-long expertise of Brainstorm in real-time broadcast graphics of any kind, including interaction logic (StormLogic), data-driven templates, and statistics.

Aston 6 will be commercially available in Q4 2023 and will be a free update for all clients with a current support contract.