It ’ s an augmented mascot It ’ s not untypical to go big in the NFL , which is exactly what the Carolina Panthers did at the dawn of the 2021 season .

How did they do it ? They enlisted The Famous Group , whose clients include WWE , Nike and AT & T , and the Unreal Engine , using an animation of the panther mascot and rendering it within a live feed of the real world .

To give the panther things to interact with , some invisible virtual modelling was needed , and camera operators had to track the animal like they would an actual living one .

Will it catch on ? Apple CEO Tim Cook is a big fan , and Riot Games have also pulled off some dazzling mixed reality showpieces for League of Legends events , but mainstream adoption seems to elude the technology for the time being , with the CGI appearance still too unrealistic .

� VOLKSWAGEN As the European Union ’ s 27 member states phase out combustion engines by 2035 , Volkswagen has seen electrified car registrations triple from 2019 to 2020 . Small combustion suppliers , some 10,000 around Europe , face a bleak future .

� ESA & ROSCOSMOS The ESA will boldly drill deeper than anyone has drilled before , as its ExoMars rover hunts for signs of life on Mars in 2022 . The drill will surpass the previous depths of 7cm by going down to 2 metres .

� TIKTOK The video-sharing giant is being investigated by Ireland ’ s Data Protection Commision over user data transferral to China and fears over child safety . The Trump administration previously described TikTok as a potential risk to national security .

� EXTINCTION Extinction could become a thing of the past if tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church succeed with Colossal , a project aiming to re-wild the Arctic with mammoths within 6 years .

technologymagazine . com 15