Professional sports are underpinned by massive amounts of technology – from how we interact, view and connect with the game to the wearable and connected tech used on and by the players and officials. So it’s no surprise that Super Bowl 50, which airs Sunday, February 7, 2016, will be one of the most technologically advanced games in history.
Levi Stadium had more than 400 miles of fiber and copper installed to accommodate 1,200 Wi-fi access points. They created one Wi-fi router for every one hundred seats. This is the first Super Bowl to be shot in 5K resolution. For perspective, normal HD is two million pixels, 5K resolution is 4.7 million pixels.
Then, there’s connected tech. On-field tracking and improved safety and tactical heads ups displays (HUD) makes the NFL an early adopter when it comes to player wearables. In Super Bowl 50, players will be tracked using Zebra Technologies on-field player tracking which uses RFID tags embedded into the players shoulder pads. The RFID tags track player data like speed, distance, orientation and change of directions on the field while the sensors on the player track their vital stats.
How does this change the game? For the viewer, it might look like your favorite player is being rotated on or off the field, but the real-time insight from the data provides a snapshot of things that are happening on the field that you can’t see. The data also gives the coaching staff the ability to decide of a player needs to be rested based on that data.
Here’s some perspective: in 1967, the year of the first Super Bowl, there’s virtually no play-by-play footage of the game because most of it was lost. In 2016, Microsoft MSFT -3.52% offers a view of what the Super Bowl 50 experience could be like through HoloLens. So, let’s look at the possibility of a future Super Bowl game where instant replay was truly instant.
What if game officials had on-the-field, real-time access to video streams from cameras that analyzed scenes just like the human eye does. Clearer, precise and faster processing video would result in faster, more accurate decisions on the field and prevent delays caused by the league’s introduction of replay reviews by game officials, some of them located upstairs in the press box and some of the video even being reviewed by folks back at NFL HQ in New York.
A French company, Chronocam, has a neuromorphic-based vision camera and sensors that could change the meaning of instant replay for the NFL. The camera and sensors are biologically inspired by how the brain and eye work in tandem to process images. Chronocam’s camera and sensors can adapt vast changes in brightness, detect edges, signal temporal change and detect motion, like the human eye. The company focuses its cameras and sensors on applications on self-driving vehicles, drones and IoT devices, but their technology can be applied to any face-paced dynamic scene viewing environment by sampling different parts of the scene at different rates which mimicks how the eye works. With this approach, the parts of the scene that contain fast motions (like a specific parts of the play in question) are sampled rapidly, while slow-changing parts (players that aren’t involved in the play) are sampled at lower rates, down to zero if nothing changes.
Take Super Bowl 50, there may only be nine officials on the field but adding eye-like cameras to the mix could multiply the number of eyes on the game so no one misses a trick – or a holding penalty.
SOURCE: FORBES.COM
