Can an Astrophysicist Change the Way We Watch Sports? | Hacker News Reader

Can an Astrophysicist Change the Way We Watch Sports?

fivethirtyeight.com

48 pointsecopoesis12 comments

By the time the video of the sporting event is transmitted through the air, satellite, or internet, there is already a time delay between when the viewer sees an event happen and when that event really happened. When you watch an NFL football game on cable or satellite, you are really watching something that happened dozens of seconds ago, if not a couple of minutes ago.

That is plenty of time to inject post-event meta data into a broadcast to enhance the viewing experience. There is no need to predict if a basketball shot is going to be a miss to the viewer at home. We can simply wait for the event to occur and then the broadcaster can inject the results between the time the event occurs and the when the viewer sees the event.

I guess not many people watch sports from a DVR, but imagine if you had an hour to two to computationally enhance the sport event's display.

Or maybe you could watch an episode of The Walking Dead and elect to see real time Twitter/Instagram/Facebook reactions alongside the broadcast or on your second screen.

So what's the main benefit of a live system like this? Wirelessly signal players to rebound or not? I guess we don't have to worry about that, it's not like one of the owners is developing this.

> There are three names on the patent application: Matthew L. Ginsberg, Navarre S. Ginsberg and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban

/facepalm

The "yellow line" in football mentioned was developed by Stan Honey's company, Sportsvision. That was the most popular innovation in that space. The visual hockey puck trail, not so much. He later did the America's Cup graphics, including the "flag on the water" effects. (He's very much into sailing.) It's possible to generate many more sports graphics than are currently being used, but it's also easy to overdo it.

Honey previously did Etak, the first car navigation system. No GPS, just a rate gyro, 2-axis tilt meter, wheel counters, and map data from a cassette drive. Worked quite well.

I have no particular insight, but it seems like this would be most useful for training, not playing or broadcasting sports. For example, imagine practicing free throws or pitching with a buzzer that goes off when any part of your body deviates from correct form.

The camera science is fancy, but to me the bit at the end: "At the very least, he doesn’t want this tactic available to just one team."

A week or so ago there was a discussion sparked by advanced curling brooms here about how sports shouldn't be "enhanced" by technology (eg: the sharkskin swimsuits are cheating). What if a team had every player wore a device that told them things:

- the shot is not/is going in - the pass is coming to your area of the field - jump! duck! - etc

Would that be different than having a good coach vs. a bad coach? A communicative teammate vs. a silent one?

In Formula 1, where these sorts of things are both technologically easier and very useful, many forms of driver aid have already been banned. Because viewers want to see men drive cars, not robots.

So I can't imagine the governing bodies of lower-tech sports getting on board with these sorts of things.

Formula 1 is especially amusing to me. Rather than saying "no tech" it says "not this tech" which just invites loophole finders. eg. the so called "F-Duct" (http://www.formula1-dictionary.net/f_duct.html) - you're not just watching drivers drive, you're watching engineering teams compete with the world's best drivers at their disposal.

What would a Serena type athlete be able to do with even more information? It's not steroids, it's data. What would Tim Duncan and Greg Popovitch be capable of with even more knowledge? I'd kinda like to know and see.

I could see teams using this to gain an advantage; they look for every edge they can get. If you think it would be too contrived, consider this example:

In a 1951 baseball playoff game the New York Giants (who later moved to SF) contrived an advantage over the Brooklyn Dodgers (who followed the Giants to the West Coast): If I remember correctly, the Giants placed someone in center field (outside the field of play, behind the wall) with binoculars. He would read the catcher's hand signs to the pitcher, indicating the next pitch. They buried a wire from center field to the first base or third base coach, which would vibrate something under his foot signaling the pitch to him, and he would signal the batter. Nobody knew until 2001 that when Bobby Thompson hit a legendary game-winning home run off of Ralph Branca, sending the Giants to the World Series, Thompson knew ahead of time what pitch was coming (a very large advantage for a batter).

Would a team use 2015 technology to gain an advantage? They wouldn't even need to bury a wire.

> Then do something interesting with that fact

Looks like a solution looking for a problem, I don't mind waiting one or two seconds to see if the ball goes in or not (that's part of the emotion of the game), but then again I've been very wrong many times before and a younger generation may like this.

FoxTrax was basically a bandaid because hockey is really hard to watch in my opinion without an HD TV. The k zone is interesting too because non-fans of baseball I've talked to seem to really like it because the strike zone is very mystifying.

Now tell me who is going to get the rebound on the missed shots.

The next step is to predict where the rebound will go on a missed shot. And of course, trigger an according haptic notification on a wearable device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com