MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Golf balls fly far, NASCAR stock cars race around the track, and football action is fast -- so fast that you might miss something. That's why computer scientists are stepping up to the plate to help TV viewers see exactly what's going on. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the sports you watch on TV.
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How'd they do that? And where did that yellow line come from?
It's computer graphics taken to a whole new level.
"We instrument the broadcast cameras," Ken Milnes, an electrical engineer at Sportsvision, Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., told Ivanhoe. "We know where the camera is pointed and how the camera is zoomed. By using mathematics, we can project graphics onto the football field."
Computer scientists and electrical engineers at Sportsvision use chroma keying -- just like the weather guys on TV -- to superimpose the first down line on the field. But that's not all they do. In NASCAR, they make the invisible … visible.
"You can't see it," Milnes said. "It's air travelling over the car."
Scientists use advanced fluid dynamics algorithms to see drafting -- how air flows over a car. They track the cars with GPS and are able to create real-time graphics to show what's happening. They can track cars going 200 miles per hour to an accuracy of one inch.
"We can track all 43 race cars five times a second to an accuracy of one inch," Milnes said.
As for baseball, cameras not only track the pitch, but the pitcher.
"A pitcher was underperforming, and they looked back at our pitching data and found that the release point had changed," Milnes said. "So once they realized that, they were able to correct that motion and his performance went back up."
In golf, radar measures the club speed and the ball speed. In soccer, they use something similar to radar --called LIDAR --that uses infrared light to reflect off the players and track them.
Now you know how they did it!
This technology isn't just for viewers. Athletes are using this technology during and after competitions to better their game.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.-USA, the American Physical Society, the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
Where did that first down yellow line come from? How about the NASCAR animation that shows which driver is drafting another driver? We go inside the company to find out how they did it.
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