Serena Williams is an American professional tennis player that has been ranked singles world No. 1 by Women’s Tennis Association.
Just recently, Nike had this A.I campaign featuring the athlete. Nike unveiled a blueprint showing how her game stacked up against her development throughout her career.
What’s cool about every Nike campaign is that, it makes sure it celebrates every moment in history most especially involving achievements of legendary athletes.
Nike, together with AKQA studios in Melbourne, Portland and São Paulo travelled back in time to create a match-up between Serena from her first Grand Slam at the 1999 US Open versus her most recent at the 2017 Australian Open. The goal was to gain insight on how Serena got to where she is today and how she keeps challenging the future.
Machine learning was able to model each era’s playing style: decision making, shot selection, reactivity, recovery, and agility based on archival footage.
The result was seeing both Serena’s play each other for 130,000 games and 5,000 matches, enough tennis matches to stream for an entire year if played back-to-back.
If you’re going to question because that’s for sure, Nike was able to bring the models of Serena to life by re-rendering the players from each generation into an entirely new scene and have them appear to be playing and responding to each other. The idea is surprisingly similar to May’s Michelob Ultra campaign, which saw today’s John McEnroe playing against five virtual versions of him.
The final game was broadcast to the public on August 11 as a YouTube live stream, with social media posts promoting the broadcast on Nike’s Instagram and Twitter channels.
Watch the extra amazing campaign below:
