Sony And D.LEAGUE Unveil Tech

Sony Corporation and D.LEAGUE, Inc. will introduce a synchronisation evaluation support system for the 26–27 Season of D.LEAGUE's professional dance competition, which Sony sponsors.

Using eight venue-mounted cameras, the system captures dancers' movements, analyses the synchrony of multiple performers, and presents results alongside video for judges' reference, providing objective information to support expert assessments.

By applying this technology, Sony and D.LEAGUE aim to help dancers refine their performances, communicate the appeal of dance to a broader audience, build the fan base, and foster further growth across the dance community and industry.

D.LEAGUE routines feature demanding elements—low stances, intricate poses and rapid rotations—often under fast-changing lighting. Accurately extracting movement from camera footage in these conditions calls for advanced human pose estimation. Leveraging data and know-how gathered in the D.LEAGUE environment, Sony has developed a system that reliably tracks the movements and poses of multiple dancers. Because it is markerless, the system supports judging without interfering with costumes, choreography or dancers’ artistic expression.

During the 26–27 Season, "Performance Synchronization", one of D.LEAGUE's judging criteria that assesses how well all eight members of each team move in unison, will be supported by the tool. The system is strictly assistive and will not determine match outcomes. Judges responsible for performance synchronisation will first watch the routines live, then consult the system's video and numerical outputs as reference. Across the season, Sony and D.LEAGUE will review how closely the system’s calculations align with judges' evaluations and consider future applications.

LYNXCOPE markerless motion capture records the movements of multiple people with high accuracy in real time, without requiring markers, then analyses and converts those movements into digital data via Sony's proprietary AI model. With multi-angle filming from several cameras, it can estimate body motion even when performers overlap from certain viewpoints, and its configuration scales to the number of people tracked and the size of the area.

Sony Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation and oversees the Entertainment, Technology & Services business. With the mission to “create the future of entertainment with creators through the power of technology,” Sony aims to fill the world with emotion.

Launched in Japan in 2020 with the mission to "change the world through dance", D.LEAGUE is a professional dance league in which world-class dancers compete across genres each season. In 26–27, 20 teams will compete in two blocks—BLOCK HYPE and BLOCK VIBE—playing a round-robin REGULAR SEASON before the top three from each block (six teams total) advance to the CHAMPIONSHIP to decide the SEASON CHAMPION.

sony.co.jp