Sports Cameras

So today we're going to talk about some interesting technology. Um, and this was something that has been requested of us from a couple of different people. We're gonna talk about sports, specifically, specifically hawkeye, right, but but there are other sports we we actually we struggled with what we were going to call this podcast because down yep I had said hawkeye not an avenger, but was told that that was not

s c O worthy. Well, I you know, when we we started thinking about the technology used in sports officiating and sports broadcasting, they're all kinds of technologies that they used for for a variety of different things. And um, Jonathan and I researched some of the same technologies and some of different technologies, and in fact, I'm not sure we'll get to everything we looked at. We may have to come back to it in the future, write it down and and and come back to some of it.

But specifically, we wanted to talk about the Hawkeye officiating system because that's one of the topics that both of us worked on. And if you haven't heard of this, um it may depend on which sports you follow. Hawkeye is used. Americans probably would know what best for tennis. If you're a tennis fan, you know that for years they've used systems to try to help them officiate whether or not the ball hits on the line or next to the line, Is it in? Is it out? Uh?

Is Wacknrow going to throw a complete fit that really has almost nothing to do with whether or not the ball was in or ound. No, but there's like a chance that will happen. Yes, and it's always entertaining when he does. It was wonderful anyway, But yeah, and to varying degrees, Hawkeye is the newest, I would guess, newest system, or at least the newest one I've heard of that's used for this purpose. And it's highly highly accurate, and I see I see in looking into it in greater depth,

why people are so interested in it. Yeah, and it's not just used in tennis, of course, that's that's what Chris was mentioning. That was the one that the American folks would probably be most familiar with, but it's also been used quite a bit in cricket, which as I studied and as I learned more and more about the hawkeye system, I realized that compared to cricket, hawkeye is really easy to understand. Cricket is impenetrable. I seriously, you

it's an asseason. All the folks out there playing cricket, it's pretty much everybody. How do you even understand what's happening? Like do you wake up in the middle of the game and say, are you just making the rules up as you go along? Seriously, I don't understand. Yeah, you know you're gonna get hate mail for that. And we need to have a podcast just on cricket so I can listen to it, because I sure as heck couldn't talk about all right, anyway, that's neither here nor there.

So well, it's the too share similarities in that you have a smallish balls being thrown or hit, and the thing is you have to tell whether or not it's landing in a certain spot. Um And what hawkeye does It can it can tell you, uh, for one thing, where the ball is hitting, whether it's in or out hits on online. But it also can tell you it can give you an idea of the distribution of where

the ball is landing. And it's a lot easier to tell, you know, for example, where a a sock car ball or a football or football depending on how you look at it, or a basketball, those those balls are are large, considerably larger, and they're easier to spot. But yeah, I mean, trying to follow something like a hockey puck or a cricket ball or a tennis ball is or baseball you

know there. That's why a lot of these technologies are being developed to help augment human ability to see where it's going and maybe give us some insight on how

to play the game a little better. Yeah, So in hawkeye, for I mean, it's it's not unusual to think of cameras on a sporting event and cameras being used to try and determine whether or not a ball has passed out of play, and that we've seen that in lots of different sports, and you know, you'll see it in football even then, where you'll you know, they'll have to do a slow motion replay and the referees will be looking at to make sure that the call they made

was an accurate call um if their call has been challenged. The same thing in other sports. There are other sports where you are allowed to challenge the ruling of a referee or umpire and uh, and then you usually have either a moment where the referees will talk amongst themselves or they will refer to whatever the tape is right right. Of course, there is much debate about whether or not this is okay or not, and whether, you know, should

we bring technology into it? Should it just be like human error is part of the game, and therefore it's part of the game, both on the part of the

players and the officiates. And other people are saying, can we please just take the officiate error out so that we just have to worry about the player or well, considering how good the technology has gotten, it's understandable that this debate has continued because hawkeye itself is at least according to my research, accurate within three point six millimeters, possibly a little bit better. At least according to the person who invented it, Dr Paul Hawkins. Now hawk, Okay,

you feel like I've heard that Plkins. At any rate. The the the interesting thing to me about hawkeye is not that it's it's not that it's it's a you know, a complex camera system. That part's interesting. But what's really interesting to me is that using these cameras and triangulating the images captured by these different cameras um and measuring the speed of the ball and the path of the ball, Hawkeye is able to project where that ball would have

gone had it not encountered something. All Right, So this is not necessarily important in every sport, but in some sports it means a great deal. This is where we get back to cricket, where I was having a really hard time figure out why do you even need this for cricket? Um Because for those of you who are cricket fans who or perhaps you're not familiar with say American baseball, we don't really look at replays for baseball

that that doesn't really have been well often. Yeah, and that's another one of those things that keeps coming up, should there be should there be a replay system in baseball? So That's why I was wondering, like, why do you need it for? Why do you need it for a cricket? Well, cricket, you know, they have their elements in cricket that are similar to baseball. But that just fools you. It reels you in and then think makes you think you understand

how what's happening, but you really don't. Well, the two sports are cousins, they do share some similarity. So the batsman in cricket stand in front of the stumps right the wicket based based on what I know of cricket. Okay, so you have the bowler who lobs the ball, uh, and the bowler's aim is to knock over the wicket, to knock over the stumps, and the batsman is defending the stomps, trying to hit the ball out of the

way and earn runs. Well, sometimes the ball will hit the batsman and there there is a a a term called leg for wicket, which is essentially meaning that the batsman's body has has encountered the ball and that the ball would have continued had the batsman not gotten in the way and then knocked the wicket over. Well, clearly that would be an unsportsmanlike way to prevent the bowler

from hitting the wicket. So hawkeye has been used in cricket to project where the path of the ball would have been had the batter not batsman, not been in the way. So the idea is that, well, sometimes the ball would have hit the wicket, sometimes it would have bounced over the wicket or bounced to the left or

to the right of the wicket. And yet if you're officiating, if you make this call, uh, you know, you're basing it on your own perception of what's happening right, your own the angle that you're looking at, and um uh you know how closely you're paying attention. Hawkeye is supposed to try and take some of that guess workout by stating by by measuring the path of the ball, the speed of the ball, and and essentially guessing or calculating

where the future path would have been. So that's a very useful feature there because it takes theoretically, if it works, it takes the human element, the guessing, the estimation out of it. Now, what I find interesting about this is that humans we tend to really like this kind of prediction, right, predicting where something's going to go based upon the angle and the speed. Because if we didn't love that, angry Birds never would have become a huge hit. But this

is serious, I'm serious. Think about it. Think of all the games that we play that depend upon accurately assessing how the path of an object is moving through the air. I mean baseball and football, and both depend on it because you have to be at the right place at the right time to intercept it. Right. Let's let I mean get right down to it. Sports. A lot of geeks say that they don't like sports, and that may

necessarily be true. Two, but there is a geeky element to sports otherwise, and I don't know of a sport for which this is not true. We wouldn't be keeping these elaborate statistics about the you know, well, in the fourth quarter, the team that is a head is likely to win by seventy six percent of the time. And you know, he gets on base, he's likely to score you know, four d per cent. You know as well,

you get into them and totally messed that up. But I'm basically they keep a lot of the sports statisticians keep all kinds of amazingly uh minute statistics about every living every little thing you know, on days when it's seventy six degrees and you know this kind of right here, his name is Paul Revere. That's just going to open another door to another world we don't want to go

to right now. But yeah, I mean, this is another one of those examples of adding technology that's going to help us track that much more information about the sport and gives us something else to argue about, which is another sporting tradition, right, but that's sometimes more entertaining than

whatever is actually going on, depends on the sport. But but yeah, I mean, we're interested in what would have happened and how likely is this particular outcome versus that particular outcome based on history and the ambient temperature and all kinds of other things. And hawkeye does take a lot of that into account. That's the one of the interesting things about hawkeye is, um, there's a battery of cameras. They go around the playing surface, whatever sport you're playing.

And there are people who want hawkeye used for baseball, American baseball, cricket. It's the pitch, right or but yeah, but but the cameras are only part of the story, as Jonathan pointed out earlier, and yes there is there are computers on the back end, but what what really fascinated me is and the number cameras depends on whatever sport is in question. There might be more or fewer

depending on the area. Ten yea cameras. It is a lot of cameras, especially considering the size of a tennis court. But the fascinating thing to me is the prep work that takes to go in. And the reason that Hawkeye isn't used more wide in a more widespread way is it's expensive. You might say, why, it's just some cameras. Well, yeah, and they're sophisticated cameras, sure, but you also require people to run the system. And part of that is it

takes prep work. The surface of the playing surface, whatever it is, is mapped because it's I can't think of a playing surface and it seems flat to us when we go out to stand on the on the tennis court or or the cricket pitch, but it's not. And the computer maps. The Hawkeye system needs to map the surface of the ground and where the lines are and where all the things are on the feet yield so

that it knows essentially where everything is. It takes into account the temperature and other factors because of course, the the tennis court could heat up depending on the color of the tennis court, that the material the court is made of, grass for example, or clay. Um clay is a little bit different because you know the clay, you can actually see if you've ever watched a clay court match, uh, you'll see that it leaves a little dust mark when

the when the ball hits. That's easier for them to tell. But on other surfaces like grass, it's not as easy to tell, but it will heat up and that can actually change whether or not the the court is expanding or contracting depending on the temperature. And Hawkeye has to take all of that information into account um so that when the cameras do record the trajectory of the ball, and it also needs to know how the ball is

going to act. Right if you're you're looking at a tennis ball, how does a tennis ball behave when it hits the earth versus cricket ball. Sure, so it takes all of this stuff into account, which is why the system is so sophisticated and so remarkably accurate. At tracking where the ball is going to land based on you know, the way the ball is hit or is thrown, and the surface it hits in the in the environment that

it hits. I think that is absolutely amazing how how how it works like that, And it does require human intervention too, because people have to operate the equipment beforehand and during the game or the match to h to make it work. And there's definitely some controversy here as well, because you're talking about I mean, yes, Christmas pointing out it is very precise as a margin of error around

three point six millimeters, that's pretty tiny. But should you have a situation where Hawkeye is essentially telling you that let's let's say that it's a tennis match. Okay, let's say it's a Test match and the the the the referee has said that it is uh that the ball was hit out, and then the other the player who hit the ball, challenges that call and so they review it and Hawkeye says it was in, but it was in by one millimeter. Well that's within that range of

error at every point six. So then you have to decide does that does the is the referees call upheld or overturned. If it's overturned, how do you justify that when the the the the distance that it was you know that that it fell within is less than the margin of error for the system. See, there's an all new uh, all the dimension of arguing about sports to be like, no, that's within the margin of error. You

cannot you cannot overturn a call based upon that. I mean that that that could become that could be the outcome of that argument. Or they could say, all right, well we're gonna trust the machine over the person even though the machine gave us a reading that could theoretically

be wrong. Um. Yeah, that's the sticky thing. And of course, when you're talking about one millimeter, you get into a point where without the system, you know, you just have to go with whatever the the referee or or officiate says. I mean, you don't have you don't have the benefit of checking back on with another call, and sometimes you just you know, you got to accept the fact that there is this element of error that's going to happen

because there's no perfect system to judge it. I think if there were a perfect system, would it change the game? It can? Um from what I've seen Uh, A lot of the tennis players seem to like Hawkeye. They seem to feel that it's pretty accurate. And if you're willing, if you're willing to agree that the system is accurate

and to trust it, then that's one thing. But I think you're right, Jonathan that if if a call comes within that margin of error, even when you said, yes, you know what, I trust this computerized system over the official when it's a really tight call like that, I believe it to be accurate. If they says one millimeter and you go, well, yeah, but it's precise to within three,

it really could have been out. I mean, I think that causes even the people who are really behind the technology too, you know, because it's an emotional issue, especially when you've been playing hard and it's it's you know, it's an important match like you know, the Wimbledon final for example, or the French Open, one of the Grand Slam championships. It's you know, I think even the people that are behind it are going to be a little reticent to just trust the machine. But that's that you

have to trust the humans. If you don't trust the machines. Yeah, that that does come down. Yeah, exactly. You're like, well, does that mean that something we know of that's accurate up to three point six millimeters is somehow worse than a humans perception? Is the humans perception actually more accurate

in this case? I mean it's a delicate subject. And like like we said before, with the the clay courts, that's where you're you start thinking, hey, maybe we just need to start playing on clay a lot, because then at least we can look at where the mark is and say, all right, now, clearly this is where the ball hit and you know the ball, Yeah, the ball bounced out, but the ball initially hit within the lines.

Of course, then you're gonna have all the players who specialize on all the other courts say no, no, no, no, no, no grass courts where it's at. Yeah, And then you have the well, how how accurate is the little dust mark? Right? Is that within three millimeters Someone's been standing over there stomping a lot. So I'm not going to totally entrust that either. Yeah, right here, sports is one that's one of the that's one of those issues where uh, seemingly

tiny events can erupt in huge controversy. Yeah, so at any rate, I do think this is a pretty cool um device. And when Christmas talking about the back end with the computers, they're all obviously running algorithms that allow the the Hawkeye system to project where the ball either was going to go or it can predict where the

ball actually landed. UM. The usually if you're talking about triangulation, you're talking about at least feeds from at least three cameras being the triangle right, and then based upon those three those three streams of data, that's what the Hawkeye system uses to predict where exactly it landed or where it was going to go. Uh. It's a pretty interesting system and I would be very interested to see it

applied to other sports as well. UM. I think, for one thing, even if you're not using it as a way to to back up calls or overturned calls, it could in theory be a really useful system just for players and teams and to to really kind of see, you know, well, I meant to throw this kind of ball, you know, the ball this way, but it actually came out that way, or you know, uh, how accurate am I when I'm trying to hit the wicket in cricket? Um,

that sort of thing. It could be really useful, although again it's very expensive system, so really you only see these things trotted it out for actual games as opposed to you know, practices and things like that. Yeah, it's uh, it's interesting to note to based on on what you just said and the numbers I saw. UM. And I should say that I did UM most of my or a lot of my research from an article uh in the New York Times that appeared in two thousand and

eight by Aaron Pilloffer. UM. He said, the system itself actually costs around a hundred thousand dollars or so. UM. That probably goes up a little bit or has gone up a little bit in the last couple of years. And I think it probably depends on the arena and the and the type of system, the number of cameras

you have to have. UM. It also requires again you have to pay people to run the equipment, so it is not inexpensive, and it's not the kind of thing you know, you'd have to set aside a good chunk of change to put that on your practice fields. UM. But you know, if you want to be really, really good, maybe it's worth it. Yeah, I saw that. I saw

it was also used in UM the snooker Championships. Really yeah, wow, I wen't have how many cameras you would need because that's a really small playing surface relative to say a cricket pitch. Yes, but you know what that that would be fascinating though, because you could you could measure. I would assume that a surface that small would be easier to map with a computer UM, and the temperature would be more controlled because it's something that you do indoors mostly.

I don't think they don't think they play arena. Yeah, but but yeah, that would be kind of interesting. And yeah, well the idea is that it'll it'll kind of show why shots went awry. Yeah, right, like someone when you see a championship snooker player. I'm not gonna make any jokes about them, but when you see them line up a shot, you think, you know, well, why did that

shot not work out the way it was planned? And that's the ideas that with this system you could actually review that particular shot and see what exactly went wrong. Was there some sort of imperfection in the table surface or was it merely the technique the player used that you know, it made a wrong judgment and that's why it didn't work out. That's kind of interesting. Yeah, it's funny.

We're we're past the twenty minute mark of our podcast, and and I'm thinking I've already thought of a couple of things that I didn't do any research on sports related technology that we can talk about later. But yeah, I think we can definitely do a couple of sports podcasts. And it's I do think that it's an illustration of uh, you know, it's not sports aren't just for the athletes. There's something for the geeks to get into as well. Yeah, I have two very simple camera systems I wanted to

talk about are not These are not Hawkeye systems. This is unrelated to that, but I wanted to talk about it because it ties into a podcast we did um earlier several months ago. And it also I just think is it's kind of those cool innovations in technology that aren't as you know, we talked about a lot of stuff that's really high tech, you know, complex computer systems and high speed like these cameras, and that the Hawkeye system uses their high definition, high speed cameras so they

can slow this action down to a crawl. But not all systems need to be quite that complex. And a good example of this is I don't have to thank Tyler Klang for this, our producer, because he he actually sent me the information. UM. Some systems designed by Garrett Brown are actually deceptively simple and yet they have really helped with capturing footage, specifically for events like the Olympics. And Garrett Brown, if that name sounds familiar to you,

he's the guy who invented the steady cam. So we've talked about the steady cam in a previous episode, and Garrett Brown has continued to innovate camera systems. UM. He's retired from shooting films himself, but he still works on designing systems to capture footage in unusual situations and for some of those he developed systems for to capture footage for the Olympics. One of them is called the mob cam. Now, the mob cam is designed for swimming events, so if

you're watching the races, you know, a swimming race. UM, this is the camera that's on the bottom of the pool that can take footage shot upward, so you get to see the swimmers as they swim through the pool. It's actually mounted on a track a little thin track

and it's operated by pulleys manually. So Garrett Brown would demonstrate this by you don't have this pulley system where he would have a crank that would be attached to a spool and then what he could do is turn that and it would pull the line which would then and pull the the camera on the track under the water, so you could follow along with the swimmers, and he would watch on a monitor so he could keep the right speed, and then when it would get to the

when the swimmer would get to the end, if they it was like a race that had multiple lengths, then he would just reverse start turning the crank the other way and the camera would move the other way down

the pool. Um it's all. The reason why I decided to go manual was because he was afraid that using some sort of motorized or robotic system would um would raise ire among judges and athletes because it would it could theoretically change the conditions of the pool, and you don't want to do that when you're talking about world class Olympic athletes where the tiniest detail can affect his or her performance, you don't want to create cause for concern.

So Yeah, it's a neat little camera and you just and it just scoots along the bottom. And that one's a couple of decades old actually, but a more recent one that was introduced in the two thousand Olympics his the dive cam. Now the dive cam again deceptively simple. Imagine you've got an Olympic sized swimming pool. You've got a tube that is uh extends all the way up to the height of the um diving board and down into the water. The tube is weighted, it's it's got

air on the inside. It's capped at the top, so it's weighted so that it doesn't float away. But the tube is set up so that the cameras at the very top of the tube when the diver is about to begin his or her dive, and there's a release another Pulley system, but there's a release where you where the operator releases the camera just as the diver starts to dive. And because we all obey the law of gravity,

we all fall at the same speed. So the camera falls at the same speed as the diver and goes all the way down and even goes down into below the water line, right, which you can do because the tube exactly the tube extends beneath the water line, so the camera continues to go down and capture footage of the diver as he or she enters the water. And then there's some bungee cords attached to the camera that will slow it's descent so it doesn't just crash at

the bottom. And then you use a pulley system to raise the camera back up and you're ready to go for the next dive. So it's really kind of a neat way to follow a diver all the way down the entire uh length of his or her dive. Yes, and I'm sorry, no, no, go ahead. You were about

to say something, it's gonna say. UM, I could talk about one other technology that I investigated, UM and UH That basically is another camera related technology, and it's very similar to Hawkeye in some ways, UM, most notably in that it requires UM it requires mapping the field of play, and that's UH something we actually have a great article

on on how stuff works dot com. UM It's something originally developed apparently by a company called sport Vision, a New York City company that debuted its first and ten system on a game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Baltimore Ravens on septem So we're talking about American football here, and that's if you've ever wondered watched a football game and wondered how they it the first down line to appear, that yellow line to appear on the field, because you

know that's not painted on there. UM. In American football, uh, you play with a the team has given four downs to make a first down. Basically, they have to go ten yards UM to get a first down, and they have four chances to do that in order to advance down the field and hopefully score. That's the objective anyway, while the other team tries to prevent that from happening. UM. So there is a line of scrimmage, which is the line, the imaginary line on on which the ball starts when

they start to play. And then they have a line that is originally at the first down uh ten yards away and usually this is marked by a giant piece of orange appears to be plastic. I've never actually touched one, UM, but it's on the side of the field, and really from a televised angle, it's very hard to see because they like to zoom in on the players and and see what they're doing. So they don't usually zoom out

to the point where you can actually see that. So somebody, apparently Sport Vision, decided to create a system by which you could actually show this to the viewer. Now. Um, Like uh, tennis courts and and cricket pitches, the football field is not flat, not completely flat. Of course, people tear it up, especially outdoor arenas where it's been rainy. Uh. You know, the cleats tear up the field, It gets mashed up. Plus um, the field is raised a little

bit in the center to help it drain. UM. So it has to take the system has to take that into account. And I should point out to that there are other companies that offer this technology. UM. But in order to make this happen, there is a truck full of equipment off the field as well, and it requires some chroma key the green screen effect that we've talked about and UM and other podcasts as well. They have

to key out the colors of the players uniforms. UM. But they showed the imaginary line on the field and UM by by using the chroma key technology, they can avoid showing the line on top of the players are on top of the ball um and uh, they can they can show this imaginary line to the viewers. Now, of course it's not it's there just to illustrate, So it's not supposed to have the same kind of accuracy that the Hawkeye system does. It's just to give a

little frame of reference to the viewer. Yeah, so you have an idea, and that's why you know when uh. And of course, like most sports, UH, it can be a game of very very small I mean we're talking to the Hawkeye system millimeters, very small increments of of measurement. So when a player appears to get to have earned a first down through a running player passing play um, and it appears that way to us watching at home, it may not actually be the case because that yellow

line is not accurate. It's a a very good approximation of where the line is supposed to be. So that's why you will still see the officials use the chains to measure um. Although you know that's always kind of made me laugh too, because they carry the chain out in the middle of the field and I'm going, you guys just ran out here with that thing, you know, you're going that looks about right, um, But which always amuses me. But um, but that's how they do that.

And I had always wondered that too, and I thought, you know, since it does involve cameras, it does involve um, a special camera for that purpose. Um. According to our our article, it does require quite a bit of computer technology as well, because you have to take into account the orientation of the camera. UM. You know, they do. The producer of the broadcast is also choosing which camera to focus on, So it has to the line has to appear and roughly the same spot no matter where

you're you're showing it from. So it has taken to account the perspective of the vision angle. UM. But you know, and it also has to to be able to show the line on the field and not on the top of the players and referees in the ball. UM. But that's a pretty neat system. And I assume that that's pretty close to the system they used to broadcast graphics when they show ads or other information about what's going on in the field. They you know, they'll show it

in a place where the players aren't. UM tell you what down it is or how many yards they have

to go. UM. But that's that's pretty neat and it does require again, like like the other technologies we've talked about today, a special uh special cameras um and it does you know, the camera itself has to be communicate where it is in regard to the play and the line of scrimmage, in the line of where the first down is supposed to be earned in order to help the camera or help the computers know roughly where to

put the line. So that's uh, it's fascinating stuff. It's something I always wondered about and never really took the time to look into until it was time to do the research. So I'm glad. I'm glad we did. But there are other things that I would like to talk about in a future podcast perhaps maybe uh maybe down

the and we've tackled some other topics first. Yeah, sure, I've got I've got a great patent for a a pitch speed and strike zone invention that I think would never ever ever see the light of day, but I'd love to talk about it. Yeah, that's that's definitely one of those. And the baseball tracking technology where the baseball crosses the plate. Uh, if you're not a baseball fan,

a lot of times they'll show uh. During the game, they'll show an angle camera angle where you see from behind the picture where the where the pitch is going to the batter, and as they analyze it, the commentators will put on a tracker where we'll show you where where it was in the strike zone. Right, I'm curious to see. I haven't gone enough research on that yet to talk about it confidently, but I want to talk about that. And possibly even that glow puck they used

to use in hockey globe. Well, we'll just have to save that for a later discussion. We're gonna wrap this one up. If you guys have any questions or comments, you can let us know. You can let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled the is tech Stuff hs W, or you can email us. That email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For moralness and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff

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