Fw:Thinking Plays Ball

I love hockey, I can. I can get into hockey and uh soccer football, And we're being told to call it by many people. Hockey is a sore subject here in Atlanta, poor thrashers. Yeah, but at an't rate to Wait a minute, there is a sport I know you love. What's that? And it's the fine masculine ballet of professional wrestling, and that that is a sports entertainment and you genuinely love it. You know, sometimes we think about what's the future of of and we can't think of a thing, right,

how about sports? Well? How come on? Yeah, alright, So you had a specific science fiction film where you you wanted to describe the sport in that and how that's got to be the future, right, Yeah, you're talking about the movie Starship Troopers. But yeah, of course we're We're always talking about Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. Is so so deep in the world of sci fi sports. Yeah, well, no, I actually brought this up because it was when I was trying to think of future sci fi movies that

have sports scenes in them. This was just the first one that came to mind. And there's really no good technology and it, as far as I can recall, the uniforms look weird. They're wearing these shiny jumpsuits and uh, and they've got weird looking helmets that are more kind of like hockey helmets than foot ball helmets. And people keep doing these jumping somersaults like eight feet in the air. They don't explain why. I don't think you usually see

that in real football. Doesn't really give a notable advantage. No, And also the football looks like it's made of metal, and I'm not sure why that would be a thing people would change, like, because when I want to catch quick moving objects thrown at me by highly athletic people, I want those objects to be made of metal, really dense, so that way it causes huge amounts of damage. Right, it might just be a regular football painted to be

shiny gray. I don't know if the exactly right. Futuristic things like spaceships are shiny and made of metal, so you know this football by the same logic. Uh No, that doesn't really work. So what about what about Blearn's ball? That's a phenomenal sport. It's a wonderful sport. I can't really explain the rules. I think they're kept obscure on purpose. It seems to be something about hitting a ball that's attached to a tether. Uh, and then robots pop out

of holes. I think there's a multi ball setting like in pinball machines. But other than that, I know there's some other ones with James Khan. Yeah, you might be thinking of Death Race. Yes, actually there was a terrible remake roller Ball, You're right, or um or Pyramid the game that was played in the new version of Battlestar Galactica, and it came out although we never saw it as it was really intended to be played. It was all

like post apocalypse version of of Pyramids. As far as Star Treks concerned, I think the only sport that survives is fencing since Sulu goes crazy with that one episode. But yeah, it's it's one of the things that we thought, well, you know, we this isn't an episode of you never

see that in science fiction. We really wanted to look at what are some of the cutting edge technologies that are are starting to debut in sports today in various parts of sport, not just the performance, but sometimes the training. We're just keeping people safe, right, Well, I think in reality we're already doing better futuristic sports tech than the

Starship Troopers middle football. Yeah, just being able to if you, if you are the type to watch a football game, you know you can see where the first down line is on your television screen. That alone, that that's simple technology alone, is superior to the the Starship Troopers version. Yeah. Well, okay, here's the first thing I would ask about the future of sports. I sometimes watch people playing football or boxing or something like that and see and see it looks

like there's a lot of injury going on here. Is there a way to still get all of the athletic enjoyment people get out of playing and watching contact sports without so much risk to your body. Yeah, that's um, that's a big concern obviously. And you know, there have been some very high profile news stories that have come out over the last few years of UH football players

in particular, suffering terrible injuries from multiple concussions. Sometimes, you know, to the point where a couple of people have lost their lives, um because they've suffered such terrible brain injury. The thing about a concussion, which you know is an injury to your brain. It often is caused by the brain shifting, twisting, stretching rapidly, or colliding with the inside

of your scullion. That that it causes uh damage to the brain, damage to the brain cells that you can recover from with rest, but it does make you more vulnerable to further injury. And it's not always something that's easily detectable. It's not an external injury, so you know, unless you're paying close attention to someone, you may not notice. Uh. Now, there are sometimes indications like a person's walk might change

the way they hold themselves, might change their speeching patterns. Right, but you know, in the in the context of a game that's really fast moving, UH, you not pick up on it. They might not really be aware of it either. They may just you know, the idea of oh, I had my bell wrong, I felt a little out of it. Uh. And they run the risk of getting even more seriously

injured if they continue to play. It's so serious that the CDC, the Center for Disease Control here in Atlanta, created a document that educates people on the dangers of concussions in general and in football in particular. It's specifically geared for really for parents and for coaches, for the people and officials referees, is for the people who would be watching over football games to know what to look

for in order to spot problems before they become really serious. Uh. And so it's a big deal, and it's it's really important, and it's got some people thinking, well, what can we do to help minimize the risk of concussion. And one of the big things is actually not related to technology at all. It's just related on how the game is played. And the big bit of advice I've seen is keep

your head up. That's the big one is that don't don't put your head down in anticipation of a tackle, whether you're making the tackle or you're about you know that you're about to be tackled, keep your head up, and that helps reduce the risk. Keep in the mind that rotation can also cause a concussion. It doesn't have to be impact, So if your head is rotated very quickly, that could be enough to create a concussion. So, uh,

that's one thing is just behavior. Now that being said, there are people working on technologies to help protect football players. So a biomechanical professor at Purdue developed a football helmet liner that's supposed to reduce g forces to a player's brain by fifty per cent. So the thing about football helmets, you know, they've got that hard shell which is really there to protect against skull fractures, so it's not necessary.

It can't necessarily protect against um uh concussions because that that energy gets transferred through the helmet to the person's head, and while there they might not suffer a broken bone, they could still suffer a concussion. So this liner is meant to absorb some of that impact and disperse it so that you receive less of that hit as a result, and thus reduced the risk of having a concussion. Um The way they designed it, the way this this professor

actually designed. It was first put he put sensors in helmets between the padding and the actual helmet to detect the strength and location of hits during a particular play, like he would be able to see how that player and uh was was playing and whether or not they were at danger of a concussion or other serious brain injury and um Also he wanted to find a way to try and reduce this rotational force, this other problem of if a player's head turns too quickly, that could

be an issue. And so his idea is to have a double shell helmet where you have an external hard shell, then you have a layer of hatting, and then you have an internal hard shell and then the liner and those two shells can move a little independently of one another, so it takes some of that rotation. They don't know yet if this will actually be effective in preventing concussions. They said that it's going to take some years of testing to see how well it performs and whether or

not it actually is reducing that risk. But at least it's it's a move toward that direction. But they're not the only people who are using sensors to monitor that kind of thing, right right. The Florida Times Union reported that helmet sensors are required now in the Arena Football League. So arena football. Uh you guys, are you familiar with the arena sports ball? Okay? So arena football is played indoors.

The field is smaller than an NFL field football. It's it's faster paced, it's meant to have higher scoring games, and it's kind of a it's an alternative for the big NFL game. So it's the it's it's like the third largest UH football league behind the National Football League in the Canadian Football League. Okay, what was it, the one that was invented by that guy from one of the wrestling or man. Yeah, it's similar thinking of the XLA,

which was shut down after like a year. Yeah, it's no longer a thing, but they just mainly to have people body slamming each other on the field. They played by a variation of arena football rules, so variation being a kind word for it. Uh. Yeah. The XFL did not last very long. But the sensors inside the ad nobody tell them that extreme doesn't start with an X. This is a problem. A lot of X games come on. It's not unique at all. Okay, I'm sorry, I apologize.

Getting back on track. So, the sensors measure impact and can actually alert players and coaches and officials when a collision is strong enough where a concussion may have happened. The sensors are attached to little blinking lights that are on the base of the helmet, and if the impact is greater than a certain threshold, the lights start blinking. The official says, all right, well, you cannot play until

you are checked out. The player has to leave the field, go and be checked to make sure that the player is all right before they can return to play. So the hope is that that will end up detecting any early issues, so a player can be taken off and put on the injured roster until they're able to recover and then return to play. Because again, you know, it's a concussion is something if it's not really really severe,

it's something you can recover from with enough rest. But if you don't have that rest, then you're just going to aggravate that injury and possibly turn it into something far more serious. Uh, not that a concussion isn't serious already it is, but anyway, so that that's the other element of sensors in uh in actual football uniforms that are meant to help the safety of the players. But

it's not the only place where we're seeing sensors. Will get to some other elements a little bit later, and it gets kind of, I don't know, a little half half awesome and half kind of creepy. But but between that, I have another great story about a training system that is meant to help take some of the wear and tear off football players by reducing the physical um toil of training. You guys might not be aware of this, but football players have to practice a lot. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah,

I go by this one field. The train ride I take goes by this one field, and I see football players drilling on that field every day from late summer all the way through fall, and they run plays over and over. You know, they're they're they're making sure that their agility and their physical skills are as high as they can as they can make them, as they can train them. But they're also running specific plays to see what plays work in different situations. So quarterbacks have access

to a playbook. That playbook has all the different potential plays they have practiced that everyone on the team knows, so they can work together and coordinate to give the

best performance they can. But these plays are sometimes that you have to make adjustments depending upon how the defense lines up, so that if you have planned this particular play and you all get information and then you notice that the defense is really empathetical to what you had planned, you have to start coming up with a new new

plan on the fly. So one of the things that uh that that might be helping players in the future is something called the Axon system A X O N. So instead of running the same physical play dozens or hundreds of times so that you can learn all the different variations in the best way to make a decision. It all is a system that that kind of simulates the picking of a play and how it plays out, so that quarterbacks get used to making snap decisions in

decreasing amounts of time. So when it first starts a quarterback, who's and it actually can be used for any position on the field, but quarterbacks are what they tested it on. Quarterback will start a play and then the conditions will be such that they have to decide who would they throw to in this situation? Right who? Who is the person most likely to be able to catch based upon coverage all that kind of thing, and then they have

to make that decision. Uh. And then the time for them to make the decision decreases as they do well in this game, and that allows them to train their ability to make fast, accurate decisions, which is all part of football. Right. So it starts to get to a point where the amount of time you would have would be about the same as the point where you would break from a huddle to where you're lined up at

the line of scrimmage, and then you have to commit. Uh. So the ideas that originally this system was meant for people who were recovering from something like a concussion. It was a way to help train their minds to get back on focus and to to kind of get an idea of how they were performing before putting them back

in play. But now it's also being used as a way of actually training football players so that they take some of that physical training and they convert it to mental training so that you don't have to have this incredible physical toll on the players during the training season. I mean, obviously they still need to do it right, right, I assume that being you know, in shape is part

of that. I think. I think having a bunch of really really super sharp football players who are all very pudgy and slow is not an effective way of winning a game either, So but it it would be. Uh, it is interesting that they're taking out the some of this physical toll because because injuries can happen in training as well as in games, so this is a way of making sure that you keep your team healthier longer,

which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah, but okay, so you said that we still had more to say about, um, some of those sensors. Let's get back into that conversation. And sensors can do a lot more than detect things like injury these days, they could they could be used

for for data analysis and tracking, right. Yeah, So obviously people who are really big into sports, a lot of them are also big into statistics, right, tracking everything from how a player, how many yards rushed if you're talking about football, or if you talking about baseball, number of home runs they're batting average, all this kind of stuff. Well, you know, sports has always been this really data heavy kind of of pursuit or or hobby or entertainment, depending

upon you know, whatever you're however you're approaching it. Is this what that movie Moneyball was all about? Money Ball certainly does play a roll into this sort of thing. Yeah, the idea of being able to to look at a person's actual performance, relate that into some sort of quantifiable uh system, and then use that to have meaningful conversations or just show off how much you are able to retain.

But you know, we're only able to gather so much information and usually unless we were to put I don't know, sensors in uniforms of like football players, for example, which is happening. Um, so you're not relying on just the keen eyes of the observers, but you're actually getting a

mechanically produced data. Yeah. So for example, you know, there's certain things that we can look at, especially for like a televised game right where we can see exactly how far someone ran during a play on a football game, but we don't necessarily know how quickly they were moving, how much, how how fast is their acceleration, how long does it take them to get to their top speed? You know, what position were they in at a specific

point in the play. That kind of analysis takes a lot of time and it's hard to do on the fly. So if you are a broadcaster and you're trying to relay the events of the game to the audience and explain what's going on and why the game is unfolding the way it is, you know, you're often limited by

the amount of information that you can have at your disposal. Well, that was kind of the idea behind the the NFL going in and putting sensors into players outfits, actually into their their shoulder pads essentially, so it's uh it's meant to uh track their acceleration in particular, but other other metrics as well. It is developed by a company called Zebra Technologies unless here from the UK and then Zebra Technologies UH. They use r f I D enabled sensors.

They discussed they decided that r F I D was the most reliable means of transmitting information rather than some

other form like bluetooth or whatever. They decided r f I D was the way to go, and so UM the player players can be tracked like their position can be tracked based upon the way that the r F I D communicates with various receivers that are set up around the stadiums UH that are hardwired to a server, and the server collects all the data and makes sense of it and can even turn it into visualized data

very quickly. So you can get something like an arrow that shows the acceleration of a player and be able to really communicate why a play unfolded the way it did. So if you saw a really really effective blitz, for example, in football, you could say, well, this guy, this, this defensive player was moving at such a speed there was no hope for the quarterback to be able to evade it. That kind of thing as opposed to saying the quarterback

delayed in throwing the ball. Because often in the course of one of these games, if you don't break down the data that way, you make assumptions as to why a play unfolded the way it did. This could give both the audience and coaches and players valuable information that will end up shaping the game in the future. Of course, I can see an application of this that ties into something we've talked about on this podcast other times, which

is real time health sensing. Yeah, that's actually the kind of the paste on tattoos you've discussed that can you know, easily seamlessly go on you and keep track of all your heart rate vital functions. The the NFL plans to

do that in two thousand fifteen. So right now it's it's sensors that are meant to track the movement of players, but in the future it will also be sensors that do things like heart rate, lung capacity, body temperature, which could presumably be broadcast to spectators, so spectators could actually see. That's a whole another level of fantasy football. Yeah, that's right. Look, his heart's not even racing. This guy is a cool customer, or this guy is you know, this guy is really

starting to to sweat it. So wow, he's doing that with five mill leaders of urine and his black don't. Well, it's not gonna be that precise that early, but but this is some also something that the coaches may use in in future training, for example. Um, whether or not it actually gets broadcast to spectators, I don't know. The way I was reading it, the report made it sound

like this would in fact be part of it. I'm thinking, you know, if I'm a professional athlete, I don't necessarily want people to know how my body is performing at any given time. That's a little creepy. It's like I'm fine with I'm fine with my physician and maybe my coach, But you know, Bob who's got the cheap seats, knowing what my what my heart rate and lung capacity is

a little weird. Yeah, that's a little bit strange. Um. But but the NFL certainly isn't the only organization that is looking to this kind of data collection to help

its players out. Over in the UK, McLaren, the Formula one high end sport car company, has a branch called McLaren Applied Technologies that design sensor systems to monitor and track athletes performance as well, and they've paired up with rugby teams, UK Olympic rowers and cyclers and a bunch of other kids to help them like micro refine their their training in their in game per format and even in the design of some of the sports gear, like

like the bicycle you mentioned. McLaren has done some work with designing bikes that they ended up taking into account the writer as part of the bicycle in order to create high end bicycles that would be used in things like the Tour de France and we're talking like super expensive gear here. Yeah, yeah, we did a whole episode on McLaren over on uh we're on board thinking right now over on tech stuff. Um and so if you if you'd like to hear a little bit more about that,

you can check out that episode. Yeah, their company headquarters is totally like the place that you think James Bond goes to. That's McLaren headquarters. That's pretty cool. Yeah, Okay, So I want to know how this high tech data collection technology applies to the sport of basses ball. Bass Ball one of my favorites. I do enjoy going to a basis ball game or baseball as the rest of the human race calls it. Uh so baseball. One of

the systems that's been rolled out Reese Lee. It was announced back in two thousand thirteen, I think is that a lot of parks have incorporated the I Beacon system. Now I Beacon as a proprietary low energy bluetooth system that Apple created and low energy bluetooth systems. You can think of it as like a network of transmitters that can both transmit and receive information, so it can track your location by figuring out which one is your closest to,

so kind of like triangulation. So really you just need enough to provide coverage for whatever area you're looking at, and that will give you the information you need to be able to track person's movements and what they're doing within certain areas. So we might see this incorporated into shops in the future. In fact, a few places have

used it now for stadiums for baseball. The way it's currently being used, or at least the early implementations are largely about things like allowing spectator to upgrade their seat. For example, so your ticket might be on your smartphone. You come in, you check in, you've tapped into this uh this eyebeacon system and the sky box. Yeah, you get a notification saying hey, for a certain up charge, you can move into the sky box and you can

choose that. Or maybe as you're walking near concessions, it gives you a coupon for a specific concession, whatever that might be, or maybe it's merchandise like a baseball cap

or a jersey, that kind of thing. Now, in the future, they may also use this to transmit real time data about the game to people like so if you have the app on your phone, you might get real time information about again player stats, which could be incredible for people who are into fantasy football and really like to micromanage that kind of thing, or maybe that you get updates on games that are going on in other stadiums so or other parks, so you're which is big in

playoff season when you're watching your team play and you're thinking, well, if we win and this other team loses, we go to the play offs, than you really want to be paying attention to multiple things at the same time. So this is a possible future that we'll see where I begin will transmit this information. Right now, it looks like it's more of a kind of consumer sort of orientation where we're using it to you know, just maneuver through a park and be able to buy things. So we'll

see how it gets, how it evolves over time. I expect that will eventually see this being more of a second screen kind of experience for people who are actually at a game. Um, and if you've ever been to a baseball game, there are some stretches where you might we you know, I might want to look a different, might look at something other than an empty but is completely not happening at all on the field. Yeah, yeah,

that that occasionally does happen. Um, But so I wanted to talk a little bit about like skycam and some of the other technologies that are helping home viewers feel like they're part of the action in in sports ball. Yeah, I was curious about what televised football looked like back in like nineteen sixty eight, so I looked it up on YouTube. Tiny. It's tiny little men running around in a tiny place. It looks a little bit like like SNS styled football. Yeah, and there were some closer shots.

I think that there were some maybe cameras on the sidelines, but still it's I mean, you're not really getting in the action. There's a lot you can't see. Sure. By contrast, if you've watched American football in the last a decade or so, you've probably noticed this device zipping along on wires above the field, and and you've probably seen footage

from it too. It's it's that is in fact a skycam, and it allows for those really dynamics sweeping shots that fans of football and of you know, the Olympics and NASCAR and Indy car races and basketball and hockey and golf and concerts and feature films have all been enjoying since it was invented in the early nineteen eighties by Garrett Brown, who is the same due who invented the

steady cam. UM. The rigs are pretty expensive. They're like tens of thousands of dollars, so that's why you only see them in these kind of larger sports and concerts and stuff like that. UM. But but here's how they work, because it's it's pretty fascinating and I did not know this before. There's a really great article about it on how stuff Works dot com, which is a plug in fact. But so they work like this UM from from four high points at corners of the field, usually in like

stadiums that are already built. That's lightning towers. But it can be a constructed rigging if they need to. Uh, four reels each containing like thousands of feet of kevlar reinforced rope that's coupled with optical fiber cables spin their contents out to a to a spar where the four cables meet kind of in the center of the field,

and that's where the camera rig is held. UM. So you know, you've you've got computer controls and also a pilot and also a camera operator that are all working together. To manage this this pulley system of ropes and stuff, and uh, all the footge footage from the camera is sent back out over those fiber cables, so it can it can go out in real time, are very close

to real time at any rate. Um. And there's there's gyroscopic stabilizers that keep all of those camera movements smooth, as you might expect from the dude who invented the study camp. So it's it's pretty nifty and uh. And there's a relatively limited number of cable failures that have resulted in the skycam, say plummeting to the earth. Um. But you know, given that it is so so expensive to to set up, there is talk that in maybe the near future, drones might be used to get cameras

around the field. Yeah, I mean it's it's kind of a similar to which I find even more terrifying, but the motion picture industry same sort of thing. The idea of being able to get a rane shot without having to rent a crane. Uh oh, and also having something more stable than most crane shots because and there's also I mean there's some places, like in the middle of the stadium where you can't really put a crane because it would probably be an impediment to play. So this

would be a way of getting some of those incredible shots. Uh. Clearly that sort of thing would require, um so lots of tests and to prove that in fact, the system was fine and the drone was not going to go spiraling off into you know, the cheap seats or something that no one could hijack the signal or anything. Yeah, a little little important stuff like that. But as for something else, like a a kind of technology that is uh that is currently being used, that's still pretty pretty

impressive to me. So this is a list that changes all the time. But right now, as far as I know, ever bank Field, which is in Florida, has the record for the largest stadium screen in UM in American football. Uh, there are other larger screens that are out there. The screen that EverBank Field has has fifty five thousand feet of display area square feet. That sounds like a good thing to watch failed public wedding proposals. Yeah, boy, you just haven't lived till you've seen kiss Cam at thousand

square feet. I'd want to play Halo on that. Yeah, stop looking at my screen. I can't help it. It's

in my full view of visions literally everywhere. But at any rate, you know, that's that's one of those technologies I expect will continually see get updated, the idea of a screen that can show people who are not at that, you know, at the the sidelines, being able to get a good view of what's happening, because, like you were saying, Joe, I mean otherwise, your your experience being actually at the game may feel a lot like watching a football game in the nineteen sixties. You just see a bunch of

people running around at a great distance. So it's one of those ways of balancing that out and giving a better experience to the folks who are there. Well, there's tons more information about sports and technology and science that are all coming together to kind of shape the way the games are are played and how people prepare for them. But there's just too much to really cover in a

single episode. So I'm sure we'll we'll revisit this and probably talk about other specific sports in the future, and not just primarily football and baseball as we did here. So if you guys have any suggestions, maybe there's a favorite sport of yours that you really wonder like what's the puppy bowl gonna be like in twenty years fishing? And it could that could also be a joking, but I'm positive that there is that people are working on that.

I mean the fact that we have fish finders. I mean that alone, that that wasn't the case when I was at informed. It's cheating, so like you need to you need to just know in your gut where the fish are. Fast. Don't have the Internet, so we shouldn't die. Yeah, now, okay, now now I understand, okay, Well, at any rate, if you guys out there have any suggestions, because I'm not getting any useful ones here dropping a line, you can, you can let us know on Twitter or a Google

Plus with the handle f w thinking. You can go over to Facebook put in f w thinking in the search bar. That will pull us right up and interact with us. Let us know what you like about the show, let's know what you want to know about the future, and we read all the comments. We look forward to them, and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, I visit forward thinking dot Com, brought you by Toyota. Let's go places