Lenovo’s new Formula E role shows another route for immersive sports besides headsets, with AI-powered AR graphics, digital human fan experiences and smarter onboard video production moving closer to the live broadcast. It comes shortly after Premier League runners-up Manchester City introduced Xtadium – a VR experience for home-based supporters.
Lenovo are proving that you don’t need a headset to use XR tech in sports.
It might upset VR purists and possibly and some companies with expensive prototypes, but Lenovo’s new Formula E partnership is a reminder that immersive sport can also happen inside the broadcast itself.
Formula E has named Lenovo as its Official AR and Digital Content Provider for the rest of the 2025/26 ABB FIA Formula E World Championship season.
The deal is built around three proof-of-concept deployments: an AI-powered digital human fan experience, AI video optimisation for onboard race footage, and AI-powered AR graphics for live broadcasts.
It’s a very different route from Manchester City’s City Space VR experience, which used Xtadium on Meta Quest to give fans immersive club moments, tunnel views and behind-the-scenes access.
City Space is about bringing fans closer to club content in VR, whereas Lenovo and Formula E are looking at the live broadcast layer: graphics, onboard footage, data, AI and fan interaction around the race.
Formula E Is A Great Place To Try This
Formula E is a natural home for this kind of work because the whole sport is based around cutting-edge technology and data.
The racing is live, fast and full of moving parts, and Formula E’s onboard cameras create a practical broadcast problem: lots of fast-moving feeds, changing light, reflections and rapid cuts between cars. Lenovo’s AI Video Optimisation is designed to balance colour across the 10 onboard cameras on each car, giving producers cleaner footage to work with during live races.
Better onboard footage means cleaner broadcast storytelling, and also fewer visual jumps between cameras and a more consistent experience for viewers.
Lenovo says AI AR Broadcast will bring more dynamic, data-driven storytelling into live broadcasts through AI-powered augmented reality graphics.
In racing terms, it could mean making the invisible stuff easier to understand: speed, gaps, energy use, positioning, strategy and the tiny margins that can be the difference between pole position or back of the grid.
Dan Cherowbrier, Chief Technology Officer, Formula E, said:
“This partnership with Lenovo represents an exciting step forward in how we apply advanced technology to both our broadcast and fan experience. Formula E has always been a platform for innovation, and working with Lenovo allows us to explore AI and advanced computing in a live racing environment.“
The Fan Experience Is Getting More Interactive
Lenovo is also working on Immersive Connection, an AI-powered digital human experience built on its xIQ agent platform. The idea is to make fan interaction feel more natural and personalised, rather than leaving viewers to dig through apps, graphics and broadcast chatter themselves.
Used well, it could help explain race moments, answer fan questions, guide newer viewers through Formula E, surface driver and team context, and give broadcasters or sponsors better ways to serve different levels of audience knowledge.
Linda Yao, Chief Operating Officer, Solutions & Services Group at Lenovo, framed the job in practical terms:
“Sports organisations are being asked to do more than ever, deliver higher-quality broadcasts, create more engaging fan experiences, and operate efficiently at global scale.”
You can imagine the commercial appeal. Sports rights holders need more content, more personalisation, more sponsor value and better production, without turning every live event into a tech circus.
Sports XR Is Spreading Out
The City and Formula E examples show two useful routes for XR tech in immersive sports.
VR can give fans a new access layer around clubs, venues and moments they already care about. AR and AI can make the broadcast smarter, richer and easier to follow without asking viewers to put anything on their face!
For buyers, sponsors and sports organisations, it’s less about “headset or no headset?” and more about which part of the fan experience needs help: access, storytelling, data, production, personalisation or sponsor inventory.
Formula E and Lenovo are going after the broadcast stack, whereas City Space went after immersive club access. Both point in the same commercial direction: sports organisations are turning live events into wider digital products, with XR and AI sitting enhancing the bits fans care most about.
The terraces and stands still win, obviously. No headset, AR graphic or digital human will repalce that.
But for everyone watching from home, the broadcast is getting more room to play with, thanks to XR and AI technology.
Images from Lenovo
