Gladius debut punches in new driven era of sports
When British boxer Harlem Eubank walks into London’s Copper Box Arena on 18 July, the welterweight bout against French challenger David Papot will be the first globally broadcast fight in which every punch, feint, collision, and moment of fatigue is captured, analysed, and visualised by a new AI-powered broadcast layer.
Gladius is a platform that fuses AI, wearable sensors, volumetric video, spatial audio, and real-time analytics into a single broadcast-ready system.
DAZN will use the tech in its broadcast presentation though fans in the arena will see even more of the resulting data overlays.
“We set out to make live sports more engaging, more interactive, and more intelligible to audiences who increasingly expect data-rich, personalised viewing experiences,” explains Dr Alastair Moore, a computer scientist and UCL lecturer who has been working on Gladius for three years working alongside CEO Oliver Hickey.
Moore is also co-founder of Satalia (acquired by WPP for $100 million) and founder of DeepFlow, and sits on the board of the UK’s largest deep tech accelerator, ConceptionX.
He compares the Gladius experience to cricket’s Hawk-Eye and Snicko systems (Hawk-Eye is also used to help officiate line calls in tennis, VAR in soccer among numerous other sports). “The original idea was just having a lot more feedback as to what’s actually happening… certainly for a novice viewer, but increasingly for a professional viewer as well.”
That feedback begins with six wearable sensors on each fighter — one on each glove, boot, the rear waistband, and the gumshield. These sensors capture accelerometry, momentum transfer, and micro-movements that computer vision alone cannot reliably detect.
“If I threw a punch and pulled all the momentum out at the last minute, it would look very similar on camera,” Moore explains. “For that reason, you need the sensor on the glove.”
The sensors are paired with two computer-vision systems: one for punch classification (jab, hook, uppercut), and one for volumetric capture. Spatial audio adds a third modality, giving the system a different fidelity on contact events.
“Any one of these modalities can fail,” Moore says. “So what we’re doing is combining these different technologies together to have a single gold-standard ground truth about what actually happened in the fight.”
Gladius reports 95% accuracy across analytics validated on more than 100 fighters.
Volumetric replays
A striking features is a volumetric replay system comprised of a 23-camera array mounted above the jumbotron. It captures a point cloud of the ring, allowing the production team to reconstruct any viewpoint after the fact.
“From that point cloud, you can reconstruct any trajectory through the light field,” Moore says. “You’re not tethered to the cameraman on the corner post or the boom. Once you know what action has happened, you can re-render any viewpoint you want.”
Today, those replays are not fully real-time. “You can produce certain renderings within a minute, and pretty much any rendering within three minutes,” Moore says. “So you’re looking at between rounds.”
But he expects real-time volumetric replays within a year, driven by faster GPUs and engineering optimisations that avoid rendering the entire scene.
“Instead of rendering the entire scene, you render only the changes in the scene where the fighters are. That’s how you make the processing dramatically faster.”
Hickey calls the effect ‘Matrix-style,’ and says it will fundamentally change how fans understand combat sports.
The next wave of biometrics
Beyond punches, Gladius is testing lactic-acid sensors and pulse-oximeter monitors—tools that could quantify fatigue, recovery, and tactical pacing.
“You can start to understand fatigue in a way you can’t really at the moment,” Moore says. “Is a fighter in round five taking a rest, or are they coasting as a tactic?”
The challenge is more regulatory than technical. “It’s a long negotiating process with the Board of Boxing Control about deciding what information is available, to whom, and when,” he says.
Still, the potential is enormous. Heart-rate variability, recovery curves, and metabolic load could become part of the broadcast experience (as well as part of coaching, judging, or athlete welfare systems).
Why combat sports came first
Moore says boxing was the ideal launchpad for Gladius because it avoids the multi-year commercial cycles of leagues like football or tennis.
“Combat sports can be taken on a fight-by-fight basis,” he says. “If we wanted to put on the world championship, we could bid for it and hold it in our back garden if we want.”
The geometry also helps: two fighters, a constrained space, and predictable movement patterns.
Kickboxing, MMA, and even Power Slap are already being tested. Racket sports are next. Football will come later, once volumetric capture scales to larger fields of play.
“The rate of change in computer vision is so dramatic that things technically challenging now probably aren’t challenging in 24 months,” Moore says.
The streaming backbone
Gladius is part of a three-way partnership with Eluvio and Satalia/WPP, announced last year and initially targeted to work with events in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
Eluvio’s Content Fabric Protocol dramatically reduces streaming latency and distribution costs, Moore claims.
“Your normal broadcast stream has a latency of 15–30 seconds. Eluvio, in principle, has this down below two seconds, possibly below one second globally. If you can watch sports in real time lots and lots of new things become possible.”
For sports streaming, that opens up greater potential for viewer engagement as well as prediction (gaming) markets to multi-angle user-selected feeds.
“Rather than being given the one camera feed,” Moore says, “you can choose what streams you want to look at… follow this player, follow this car.
“Some of this stuff is possible on the current broadcast CDN backbone, but it's quite difficult and quite expensive. With Eluvio, lots and lots of user or viewer-led permutations become possible.”
The volumetric replays, in particular, become far more powerful when paired with Eluvio’s low-latency infrastructure.
Satalia’s involvement focuses on audience modelling and advertising optimisation.
“Lots of advertising and user-targeting models aren’t really focused on a sporting audience,” Moore says. “Sports viewers have a whole lot of interesting characteristics in their own right.”
As Gladius generates new forms of engagement data (punch analytics, fatigue curves, volumetric interactions) Satalia aims to help rights-holders understand who their viewers are, what they watch, and why.
“We’re trying to target sports as a viewership. If you look at most advertising and user-targeting models, none of them are really focused on a sporting audience. And a sporting audience has a whole set of interesting characteristics in its own right.
“The broad idea is that as these new sets of data, new engagement techniques, and new forms of choice for the end consumer become possible, you open up many more ways for brands and advertisers to engage. It’s the beginning of a much more nuanced relationship with the sports viewer. Social media has also disaggregated a lot of rights-owners’ understanding of who watches their content and why.
“Business 101 is know your customer,” Moore adds. “Ultimately lots of sports just have no idea who their customer is at the moment.”
Gladius is being framed as a solution to a structural problem within the sports industry. Younger audiences are disengaging from traditional sports broadcasts, and rights-holders need new ways to justify rising media-rights costs.
“This is the beginning of a new era of combat sports,” Hickey says. “Gladius creates a single, trustworthy source of truth… insights that turn raw action into compelling understanding.”
The Copper Box Arena debut will be the first time it all gets glued together. “We’ve done test events piece by piece, but this is the first full deployment,” Moore says.
The company is already in discussions with major promoters including Queensberry and Matchroom. MF Pro, which holds the DAZN deal for the Eubank–Papot fight, is expected to continue working with the company.
Saudi Arabia remains a strategic market, though geopolitical events have slowed progress. “We have spent a lot of time in Saudi,” Moore says. “Ultimately at the moment slightly unproductively, but we will get there.”
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