As Australia struggles to move from 720p sports broadcasts to 1080p Full HD broadcasts viewers in the USA are set to get a taste of some of the latest viewing technology known to man when Super Bowl 50, which airs Monday morning in Australia goes to air.
Firstly, the event will be shot in 5K resolution, and for those people who have just purchased a 4K Ultra High Definition TV what this means is that normal HD resolution which free to air TV networks in Australia are only just moving to are is two million pixels whereas 5K resolution is 4.7 million pixels.
And as Telstra brags about making Wi Fi selectively available at certain football stadiums in Australia via a few Wi Fi dishes, Levi Stadium in San Francisco where the Super Bowl game is being held has 643 kilometres of fibre and copper installed to accommodate 1,200 Wi-Fi access points. They created one Wi-Fi router for every one hundred seats.
On the field players will be tracked using Zebra Technologies on-field player tracking which uses RFID tags embedded into the player’s 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.
Microsoft is also set to offers a view of the Super Bowl 50 experience through HoloLens that deliver a virtual reality view of select players.
In the future game officials will have on-the-field, real-time access to video streams from cameras that analysed 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 mimics 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.
