AVAashima Vinayak
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NBC Olympics / VR broadcast / 2020—2022

Olympics in VR

The Games, inside the moment.

150+ hours of live and on-demand Olympic coverage—designed for presence.

Role
Product Designer
Timeline
2020—2022
Platform
VR headset
Partners
NBC · Xfinity
A freestyle skier in a Beijing 2022 competition bib carving across the landing at Big Air Shougang, skis sweeping through frame, the take-off ramp and floodlights behind against a deep blue sky — captured on the 360° camera whose lens curves the horizon.

02

What changes when the screen disappears?

Inside a headset, people still need to discover, watch and understand live sport. What they can no longer do is step outside it to get their bearings — every answer has to arrive without costing them the room they are standing in.

A television viewer who wants the medal table looks away from the screen. A viewer in a headset has nowhere to look away to. That single difference is what the whole product had to answer for — and it turns five ordinary broadcast problems into spatial ones.

Volume
150+ hours of live and on-demand programming across dozens of sports, running simultaneously for a fortnight.
Unfamiliar ground
A headset has no cursor, no keyboard and no habits. Every navigation convention had to be taught inside the room itself.
Immersion
Standings, schedules and event detail all compete with the thing the viewer came for. Context that interrupts is context that fails.
Comfort
Panels sit in a physical field of view. Placement, density and legibility are ergonomics before they are layout.
Company
Watching together is most of the appeal of a live Games — and the fastest way to fill a room with interface noise.

03

Live signal / human attention

The interface should arrive when it adds context—and disappear when the live moment takes over.

  1. Event discovery

    Find something worth watching.

    Attention risk

    Too much content, not enough context.

    Design response

    Curated entry points.

  2. Live viewing

    Stay present in the moment.

    Attention risk

    Controls compete with the action.

    Design response

    Interface recedes during play.

  3. Contextual stats

    Understand what is happening.

    Attention risk

    Context requires leaving the venue.

    Design response

    Stats open over the live scene.

  4. Replay & highlights

    Revisit a key moment.

    Attention risk

    Finding the right moment is slow.

    Design response

    Event-aware replay and saved content.

  5. Social presence

    Share the experience.

    Attention risk

    Social layers become distracting.

    Design response

    Social remains an intentional destination.

04

Two Games,
one learning loop

Tokyo 2020 established the system. Beijing 2022 extended it for greater scale, depth and social presence.

Tokyo 2020

System foundation

Established the navigation, content hierarchy and live-viewing vocabulary.

What carried forward

  • Persistent navigation
  • Schedule and medals architecture
  • Curated content and library model

Core system+Added depth

Shared foundation

One navigation model. One content architecture. A deeper second Games.

Beijing 2022

Scale & depth

Expanded the same system for more programming, deeper context and social presence.

What evolved

  • Session-level schedule detail
  • 360° content across every sport
  • Social as an intentional destination

The system wasn’t redesigned for Beijing. It was extended—reducing rebuild effort while supporting greater content depth.

One component. Two Games.

The schedule evolved without changing its foundation.

The structure remained familiar while dates, sports and session-level detail expanded for Beijing.

The Tokyo 2020 schedule grid: a July date strip across the top and sports down the side — Opening Ceremonies, 3x3 Basketball, Archery, Artistic Gymnastics, Artistic Swimming — with a filled dot for each session and a medal glyph marking medal events.
Tokyo 2020 · July
The Beijing schedule grid: February dates across the top and sports down the side, with a filled dot for each session and a medal glyph marking medal events.
Beijing 2022 · February

  1. Structure retained

    The same temporal grid and navigation pattern carried forward.

  2. Content repopulated

    Dates, sports and sessions changed without rebuilding the component.

  3. Detail deepened

    Beijing added clearer session, time and venue context.

05

The experience model

A spatial hierarchy that supports how people naturally engage with live sport.

  1. Discover

    Find what matters

    • Browse
    • Schedule
    • Library

  2. Watch

    Be in the moment

    • Live
    • Angles
    • Venue

  3. Understand

    Get the context

    • Medals
    • Sessions
    • Event info
  1. The Beijing content discovery screen: a live Alpine Skiing Men's Combined event marked LIVE with its start time and a Watch button, over horizontal rows labelled Pre Games and Team USA, each holding 360-degree event thumbnails.

    Watch Live

    One event, held forward

    The live moment stays primary. The full library remains one step behind.

  2. The Beijing schedule grid: February dates across the top and sports down the side, with a filled dot for each session and a medal glyph marking medal events.

    Schedule

    Progressive disclosure

    Show what is on now. Reveal session, time and venue only when asked.

  3. The Beijing medal table: four rings totalling gold, silver, bronze and overall counts above a ranked country list with per-medal columns.

    Medals

    Contextual overlays

    Standings appear when useful, over the live scene rather than instead of it.

  4. The Tokyo 2020 My List screen: a Videos and Upcoming tab pair above a grid of six saved event tiles.

    My List

    Personal layers

    Saved content stays close without competing with the moment.

  5. The 360-degree video-on-demand library: a grid of sport tiles including Alpine Skiing, Biathlon, Bobsleigh and Cross-Country Skiing, listing every sport broadcast in 360 through the Games.

    360° Library

    Content continuity

    Every sport stays reachable during and after the live moment.

One system. Three depths of engagement.

06

Decisions under pressure

Five frictions, and what the system did about each. The right-hand column is the only thing the viewer ever sees.

Design decisions, showing the friction, the system’s response and the resulting benefit to the viewer.
FrictionSystem decisionViewer benefit
Hard to find what is worth watchingHold one live event forward, place curated rows beneath it and keep the full library one step behind.Less hunting. More presence.
Live action moves faster than a menuReduce the watching view to the few controls needed in the moment; everything else waits on the dash.Nothing blocks the moment.
Statistics pull the viewer out of the venueOpen standings and schedules over the live scene instead of replacing it.Understand without leaving.
Depth turns into densityReveal medals progressively—country or sport, then event, then medallists.Detail on request, never on arrival.
Company arrives as clutterKeep social as a deliberate destination on the dash, never an unsolicited layer.Connected, not distracted.

07

Designed at broadcast speed

A live Games does not wait for a research cycle. Validation happened where the product did—inside the headset, against the build, between drops.

  1. The medals overview state: gold, silver, bronze and total counters above a standings table led by USA and Australia.
    Medals overview

    Placement before layout

    Panels were positioned in the forward field and reviewed inside the headset—not signed off on a monitor.

  2. The By Sport drill-down state: a scrollable list of sport rows, each with a discipline icon and a forward chevron.
    By sport

    Legibility at distance

    Type, contrast and targets were checked at the actual viewing scale rather than at arm’s length.

  3. The event detail state: Athletics 10000m Men, listing top medallists with country and result columns.
    Event detail

    Density, one level at a time

    Complex flows were specified as explicit states so each layer could be assessed against the live build.

Persistent orientation

The dash never moved.

Its position and order remained consistent across every state, turning return navigation into muscle memory rather than a search.

  1. Medals overview

  2. By sport

  3. Event detail

In all three states the dash keeps the same five items in the same order, with Medals in the same position.

This was design validation and iteration inside the headset, run against the build. It was not a formal usability study, and no participant, task-completion or eye-tracking data is claimed.

08

What it carried

A system designed for the intensity of live sport carried programming, participation and immersion at Olympic scale.

The Beijing 2022 VR home view: a virtual lounge with athlete posters on both walls, a large forward screen showing a live Alpine Skiing event with a Watch button, rows of pre-games and Team USA content beneath it, and a five-item dash floating below.
150+
HoursLive and on-demand Olympic programming carried by the system across the Games.
The Beijing 2022 environment in its NBC dressing: the Games mark on the large circular screen, athlete posters on the far wall and branded cushions on the seating.
25%
Higher engagementMeasured against the preceding experience.
The medal standings panel floating at a slight angle over a live alpine slope, with the five-item dash beneath it and Medals highlighted — statistics read without leaving the venue.
2.8M+
Immersive momentsSessions spent inside the venue rather than in front of it.

Hours are recorded in this portfolio’s project data. Engagement and session figures were supplied by NBC and are reported as provided.

09

Designing for presence, not pages

What the system had to settle before the venue existed, and what the venue proved about it.

System foundation

The same Beijing environment in its uncustomised state: every screen, poster and logo slot shown as a blue placeholder marked with its required pixel dimensions.

Designed the spatial, navigation and content rules before applying the final environment.

Beijing in context

The Beijing 2022 environment in its NBC dressing: the Games mark on the large circular screen, athlete posters on the far wall and branded cushions on the seating.

Validated those rules inside a realised venue where architecture, interface and live action had to behave as one system.

The interface was only successful when the room, headset and live moment felt like one continuous experience.

Two Games. One design system. Infinite moments.