Tucked away on L’Avenida is a lab with a one-eighth size football field painted on the floor. And if you look in the parking lot, you’ll see a spot there has been marked out as a baseball diamond.
They’re there because Sportvision, the company that invented those virtual yellow lines you see while watching the football game on TV, uses the football and baseball setups to calibrate its cameras.
The company’s executive offices are in Chicago, but its development team and the majority of its employees are in Mountain View. When I visited the offices, Marv White, chief technology officer, showed me a special hockey puck that uses infrared technology to enable it to be tracked.
The company is profitable, and expansion overseas is just starting. Meanwhile, CBS featured its latest development, FreezeCam, in the game between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The game drew the highest ratings for CBS Sports in 20 years.
FreezeCam enables fans to see a replay from different angles and close up. The company has developed many techniques for hiding lines behind players, following the ball and tracking players. A deal with ESPN means Sportvision can expand its technology into soccer, where the ball is in play most of the time — so more sophisticated systems are required.
For baseball, Sportvision tracks the ball and plants virtual local ads around the stadium. The ball is tracked to four tenths of an inch, which is remarkable considering the speed at which a baseball travels.
The company visits over 30 stadiums during the season. Logistics is a major activity and the company has three studios in tractor trailers that travel around the country. (They’re so precise that, when aligning cameras, Sportvision employees account for the stadium sagging when it’s full of people.) Besides their own crews, they have a network of about 50 freelancers trained in operating their cameras and computing equipment.
Sportvision uses digital processing, similar to that used in video games, and GPS tracking to create three-dimensional views of NASCAR racing drivers. Viewers can see virtual numbers on the cars and a dashboard on the screen, so the TV looks more like a video game.
The company also joined forces with NASCAR and Turner Sports Interactive to develop PitCommand TO GO, a mobile phone application that enhances the race for NASCAR dads. With PitCommand, the phone shows driver rankings in real time, time behind the leader and brake/throttle action. Fans can also follow their favorite driver on the Internet or on pay-per-view TV applications. Check out indycar.com to see more Sportvision technology applied to racing.
Meanwhile, the Olympics give Sportvision the opportunity to track speed skaters. Their FreezeCam technology enables the relative position of skaters to be clearly seen by freezing the motion, then restarting it again. For divers, “stroboscoping” enables a smooth dive to be broken down into a sequence of frames. SimulCam enables two different dives to be compared by merging videos. This technique can also be used for extreme sports like the X Games, where motorbikes, snowmobiles or snowboarders can be captured in mid flight.
At the recent Under the Radar conference, held at Microsoft’s conference center, Dutch company yoMedia (in conjunction with ski resort advertising agency Media Mountain) presented a novel cell phone application for snowboarders. That system links an electronic ski pass to snowboarders’ cell phone numbers. Whenever a snowboarder was filmed jumping, he or she would receive a message with a link. They could then click on the link and send pictures to a big screen at the resort — and Media Mountain would advertise around the pictures.
There’s plenty of opportunity for combining mobile phone applications with sporting events. Just wait until Google’s Open Handsets are shipping — then these sporting applications will really take off.
Angela Hey can be reached at amhey@techviser.com.
