In advance of this year’s Sports Emmy Awards, SVG is taking a deep dive into the six production-technologies nominated for this year’s George Wensel Technical Achievement Award.

Since acquiring the IndyCar Series rights, FOX Sports has set out to push the on-screen presentation of open-wheel racing forward — and a suite of augmented-reality enhancements built around the in-car camera has done just that.

The work has now earned the network a Sports Emmy nomination in the George Wensel Technical Innovation category. The recognition spotlights two interlocking technologies that have dramatically changed how IndyCar looks on air.

The first is a heads-up display layered onto the in-car camera feed, developed with partners at Mobii using machine learning to lock data graphics in place as the camera pans and tilts. The system ingests 16 in-car feeds simultaneously, applying tracking and graphics automatically so directors and graphics operators are freed from coordinating each insert manually.

The second is the ghost car, built in collaboration with SMT, which leverages the GPS vectors already embedded in IndyCar's cars to superimpose a ghosted image of the car ahead — giving viewers an immediate sense of the gap a driver is chasing in real time.

Together, the HUD and ghost car technologies can now be combined within a single shot, and FOX has continued to expand the toolkit ahead of its second Indianapolis 500 broadcast. New for 2026 is the Driver's Eye camera, nine helmet-mounted cameras overlaid with Iron Man-style AR graphics, along with new AR elements on the network's tracking drone, produced in partnership with Bolt6.

In this conversation, Fields walks SVG through the development of the AR suite, how automation has made the technology a repeatable part of FOX's IndyCar workflow, and how scale — more cameras, more angles, more data — is shaping the network's plans for this year's Indy 500.