The 100 million television viewers tuned in to Fox Sports’ broadcast of Super Bowl XLVIII on Feb. 2 saw a new visualization tool that displays on screen the swirling arrows of wind vectors inside the stadium. The flight of the football is affected by currents of air unseen by the players or fans in the stands but clearly revealed to those watching on television and the internet.
The arrows are generated by computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling of the interaction between prevailing winds and New Jersey’s MetLife stadium, which was represented by a geometric 3D model. The CFD analysis was run courtesy of Autodesk, which Fox Sports approached in December after it heard of a modeling experiment the company had sponsored a few months earlier.