Hal Hodson, technology reporter
The drama of that final pass is about to get a whole lot closer. A video camera built into the side of an football would normally just provide a dizzying swirl of images as the ball spirals through the air, but computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan, have found a way to turn that whirling world into a steady stream of video framed on the field of play.
Project leader Kris Katani got the idea after coming across a 1938 Popular Mechanics article, in which a 16-millimetre film camera was mounted inside a balsa-wood football to record a throw from the air. Katani's method gets a much better result, capturing video at 120 frames per second and turning the spinning footage into a solid stream in a couple of minutes.
To do this, the software in the ball recognises common features of the ground below in each new frame of video. Images of the sky are discounted. It then knits the individual frames together to create a smooth sequence.
In a paper describing the ball camera, due to be presented at the Augmented Human conference in Stuttgart, Germany, next month, the group writes that the end goal is to "extend the frontiers of the spectator experienceby capturing the excitement of being on the field through the ball's first-person point of view".
Katani is confident the technique could be miniaturised and streamlined to fit unobtrusively into a US National Football League football, but suspects that the NFL's strict standards will hold the technology back in the near future. "If professional hardware were to come in, you'd be able to separate the lens from the recording device," he says, allowing for the recording device to be stored securely within the ball. "The technology is there."
Spinning camera gives a ball's-eye view of the game
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Spinning camera gives a ball's-eye view of the game
