Coach Terry’s Totally Terrific Fitness Fantasy • A Fitness Fantasy Brought into Extended Reality

With a massive presence in elementary schools and homes, GoNoodle inspires kids to be their best, silly selves through safe, quality health and mindfulness content. Through a colorful cast of animated characters, kids are encouraged to get up and move—and have built powerful relationships with personalities like Coach Terry in the process. To bring these relationships to life in a whole new way, we teamed up with Verizon, Fuel Up to Play, quarterback Tua Tagovailoa and GoNoodle to produce “Coach Terry’s Totally Terrific Fitness Fantasy,” a cutting-edge children’s fitness broadcast.

Inviting children into the GoNoodle world added a new dimension to the fitness experience, challenging our artists to reconceive the 2D Coach Terry design as a 3D character. We built a new model and rig so that motion capture performers could give motion and expression to the character in real time. The broadcast itself came with its own challenge: in the show, Tagovailoa and Coach Terry appear to be standing in the same space, but they were actually shot live in two separate locations. Using Disguise hardware and Unreal Engine, our team was able to send motion capture data wirelessly from the mocap studio to the XR stage at Verizon’s 5G Lab, blending multiple camera feeds together into a seamless virtual world.

Verizon’s 5G connectivity was essential to bring Tagovailoa and Coach Terry together—and to invite children into GoNoodle’s world through live interaction. We leaned on the speed and low latency of Verizon’s 5G network and mobile edge computing to create the natural conversational flow critical to making this broadcast concept successful. We took this even further by integrating live video of a classroom into Chicago, incorporating students directly into the 3D environment in real time, and using our LiveXP interaction platform to display polling and emotes throughout the show.

“Coach Terry’s Totally Terrific Fitness Fantasy” gave kids, teachers, and parents a fun, safe, and trusted real-time fitness experience featuring two popular and cherished personalities. With innovation and interactivity at the core, the show also established powerful new ways to use 5G and mobile edge computing to create interactive educational, sports and fitness programming—a perfect touchdown for live broadcasts.