Leaders at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point recognize that a robust esports program is valuable for teaching cadets how to become skilled tacticians, make decisions under pressure, and work as a team. Cadets compete from a futuristic esports facility, the CAVE (Computer Assisted Virtual Environment), constructed to support the West Point Simulation Center.
“All of the cadets currently competing on our esports teams participated in the design and construction of the esports facility,” says Victor Castro, Director Army West Point Esports. “The hands-on experience in all aspects gave them a deeper understanding of the hardware and software that makes esports possible, empowering their passion for competitive gaming.” West Point’s players know– down to the component and cable level– how their gaming facility is built and how it operates.
Central components of the esports AV system are housed in a production booth rack. A 16×16 DXP PLUS 4K/60 matrix switcher routes AV sources to the room’s many displays. An MGP 641 xi displays up to four source windows on a single screen. An SMP 352 dual recording/streaming processor streams gaming action to West Point’s esports Twitch channel and other online platforms. The MGP unit enables display of up to four source windows on a single screen, with a live or static background and live annotation. This gives the production crew myriad choices for leveling up the production values of the content shown to local and online audiences. The SMP unit simultaneously streams video and audio from up to two sources to the Internet for viewing on Twitch and other gaming platforms. The streamed content from both sources can be simultaneously recorded to internal or external storage. A 200-watt XPA 2001 provides powerful sound through SM 26T surface mount speakers.
Game audio, as well as shoutcaster play-by-play commentary, are mixed and processed by a DMP 128 Plus audio DSP processor.
AV system control is provided by an IPCP Pro 360Q xi control processor. AV system control user interfaces include 10” and 17” TouchLink Pro touchpanels, as well wireless control from a roving tablet running Extron Control app software.
The esports venue has 50 practice gaming stations and five stations in the live tournament area. All gaming stations are connected to a dedicated Ethernet gaming VLAN. The five tournament stations provide gameplay content to the AV system via HD Pro Plenum Series HDMI cables for distribution to the room displays and for streaming over Army West Point’s Twitch gaming channel. During competitions, this Twitch channel has logged up to 2.3 million views with over 18,000 people watching.
Each tournament station includes a high-performance gaming PC with a gaming keyboard, mouse, and Dolby Surround Sound headset with boom mic. The PCs are connected via DisplayPort to high-refresh-rate, widescreen gaming monitors. For inter-player audio chat communication, each station includes a professional gaming mixamp with manual and software controls, allowing game-to-voice balance and equalization to be optimized for different game genres.
Each of the five tournament gaming stations contains a POV (point-of-view) camera above the monitor to capture player reactions. There are two more POV cameras at the production booth and the streaming station to capture video of shoutcaster gestures as they announce their rapid-fire play-by-play commentary. A PTZ camera operated from the production booth takes in the entire room. All cameras send 1080p video to the AV system via HD Pro Plenum Series HDMI cables.
