New Software Technology Is Changing Sports Forever
Software isn’t just about making the best big-business applications and big data sifters. It can be used for practically any purpose—even sports. Read on to find out how software is changing the way tennis viewers receive match statistics and how new technology could help referees in the National Football League (NFL) make more accurate touchdown calls.
New Software Makes Tennis a Geek Sport
It’s about time—software has truly made tennis a sport someone can geek out on. Thanks to software developed by IBM, which is one of the sponsors of tennis’s Grand Slam tournaments, we now have the ability to “predict how players could perform under various circumstances,” The New York Times reports.
The software, dubbed SlamTracker, was fed data gathered from more than eight years and 8,000 tennis matches. This data has proven invaluable to television announcers who rely on it for “specific statistical talking points—called Keys to the Match.”
Essentially, the “Keys to the Match” are derived from the more than 41 million data points relating to just about every conceivable aspect of a tennis match—from serve speeds to match durations.
From The New York Times:
Fans who watch the United States Open and the other three major tournaments on television have most likely seen SlamTracker’s Keys to the Match, where the announcers not only recite the information before matches, but refer to I.B.M.’s predictive analysis during them.
“You pick one or two patterns in the match and see what’s trending,” said Tracy Austin, an analyst for Tennis Channel who won two United States Open singles titles. “If she is starting to change her game, I need to tell the viewer.”
NFL May Receive New Touchdown-Review Technology
It looks like the NFL is taking a lesson from soccer and is considering using technology “similar to soccer's goal-line review system,” Yahoo! Sports reports. The point of using such technology is to help clarify murky touchdown calls that always seems to have fans up in arms.
The NFL may end up using a variant of Hawk-Eye technology, which is used in soccer to help referees determine whether or not a ball has actually crossed the goal line. Wearing a special watch that receives an encrypted signal, a referee can receive an instant notification with the correct goal-line prognosis.
To see Hawk-Eye technology in action, watch the following video, which gives you a brief rundown on how the system works:
In order to figure out where exactly a ball is located on the field, the Hawk-Eye technology “uses a series of seven high-frame-rate cameras strategically positioned in the stadium, as well as vision processing techniques.”
From Yahoo! Sports:
"Control software" collects the information in order to track the ball within the goal area. When it detects that the ball has crossed the goal line, it sends a signal to the official's watch.
Interestingly, the technology also tracks near misses, sending a signal to the referee that the ball did not cross the line in a close incident.
The English Premiere League was the first world soccer league to use the new software technology, which league officials plan on using in stadiums this season. Whether or not the NFL will follow in the English Premiere League's footsteps remain to be seen, but you can bet that NFL officials will be watching how the soccer league fairs with Hawk-Eye technology and whether or not games will experience any software hiccups.
