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The Matrix Meets The NFL
wirehead_rick writes "Imagine 'The Matrix' style special effects for the replay of sports action. Being able to see a 360-degree stop action view of that receiver's foot on the line in the end zone." USA Today covers some whiz-bang video technology being debuted in the Super Bowl.
Before anyone posts anything attempting to be funny by having football players quoting dialogue from the Matrix, remember that every possible parody of the Matrix has already been done, and is no longer funny.
Thank you
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Now we just need to give the players some guns like in the last boy scout. Then have the mics in their gear pick up a player saying 'Whoa.'
I can see it now, the cameras pan in, millions of pixels are processed, and the result shows the crowd reality, or does it?
As the crowd sees the instant replay of the player scoring the touchdown you can hear whispers in the crowd saying he is the chosen one.
information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Later,
They don't need Matrix technology! They just need some of that technology from Enemy of the State ....
... now that was coo --
... :)
you know, where they take the single POV security camera from the lingerie shop and make a 3D model out of it
oh wait, it was also impossible (did it irk anyone else when they saw it?)
rLowe
----- rL
At the Soccer World Cup in 1998, here in Germany they used a virtual soccer field, freezing all players in their current position and then allowing rotation and zoom in the virtual model, making it possible to determine, for example, an off-side position and see the game situation from a player's point of view, for example before a free kick. The system was pretty accurate, and apparently working automatically plus maybe some manual corrections of the players' postures. OK, that Matrix style thingy may look cooler, but I think this virtual field was much more flexible and practical... it should have used real textures only...
This thing was created for Sport but imagine this would make a kick ass Security Camera System. Now I can see people stealing my stuff in 360 rotation. I also see this as a great system for thing like televised surgeies. I can see the doctor from all the angles. Great teaching tool.
Okay, so for a smooth rotation, the object is at the center of the cameras, all having the same lense settings.
If not at the center, then you have to compensate for the error with matched zooms so that you don't have, as the viewer, the weird impression of a comet like elliptical motion (not even as they only cover 270 degrees).
Even if you compensate for the distance with a zoom, what about the fields of view? how do you morph your different frozen camera views into one smooth video sequence, when all your field of views are different?
My (wild) guess is that you'll see quite a lot of these instant replays at the center of the field...
Ubercool nontheless... I wonder how much processing power you need to render your animation... and how automated the whole thing really is. 33 cameras, say 3 second animation @ 60 frames/s, 800x600 that's 247Mb uncompressed @ 24bit/pixel and 32 different morphs to compute with say 5 images each... I wonder how many anchor points you use in such a morph. Anyway, sounds highly //isable to me, so 32 processors on a nifty board or a beowulf?
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
"Plans for EyeVision include erasing players from the video who aren't critical to the play and putting a transparent plane on the goal line to show distinctly whether the ball penetrated the plane and crossed the goal line."
Ok, that's creepy.
Hands in my pocket
Are interpolation frames being generated? It's hard to tell from the clips. Otherwise, it's just "stick a bunch of cameras on the field and rotate the views quickly." Neat, but hardly the Matrix.
Cheerleaders!
If you are familiar with either of the teams in the Super Bowl, then you know there won't be any "foot on the line" touchdowns. Hell, there won't event be a score. This will be a 4 overtime scoreless tie, eventually decided by a safety. Nice to see that this will be available, as it means that it will sooner or later make it into all games.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Soccer Set from Orad brought this to European and other countries several years ago.
Kenny's Kourt, on TBS and TNT has been doing this since SPRING 1999 with basketball, right here on American television.
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
I find it interesting that the engineers who designed the system referred to the Matrix technology as using still cameras. The technical (as opposed to artistic) breakthrough of those effects in The Matrix was that they used actual movie cameras, so action could continue during the rotation. The Gap ads (and others) preceding the Matrix used still cameras for that effect; that wasn't new.
An error I could overlook, but the fact that the creators of CBS's version themselves didn't know this basic fact tends to suggest they didn't bother to do their homework...
-spc
http://www.parabon.comEvidently Keanu Reeves heard about this and said, "Yet another shameless use of our ground-breaking technology. I'm sick of all these parodies."
Told that Trent "Lame Duck" Dilfer and Kerry "Lame Drunk" Collins would be the starting quarterbacks in Super Bowl XXXV, Reeves said, "Whooooa."
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-- Geof F. Morris
It's gotta be invisible to the home viewer, and practically flawless in design, to work. The first down line they use now is a good example. Fox's ugly "shadow puck" for hockey, complete with electronic trails every time the puck was fired, is not.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
You are correct that the 3D camera technique was popularized by The Matrix, but invented before that movie was made. It was used in commercials such as those for The Gap, and is called virtual camera. VC has their own camera rigs, which are patented, but I believe the people working on The Matrix seem to have built their own rigs, and thus avoided having to pay any royalty fees. (Notice that there is little mention of The Matrix on the virtual camera website.)
Free Hans!
Giants: 14, Ravens: 11. CBS is now ready to call the superbowl for the Ravens.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Touchdowns. Lots of touchdowns."
What really sucks about this is that now I'm tempted to actually watch the game. And it's not like it's some cool half-time stunt - this could happen at any time during the game. There goes my afternoon.
See, this right here makes me more than a little skeptical about how well this thing was engineered. If it was 2 years in the making anyway, it seems like the least they could do would be to hook it up a few days in advance and take some rotating retakes of, oh, the groundskeeper replacing sod or something.
Or at least take accurate measurements of the dimensions of the stadium and set up a demo in an airplane hangar someplace. While it would make for some of the coolest replays ever, I think their efforts towards secrecy and "adventure" are going to make for a barely-functional system that won't live up to its hype.
also, there was a line in there about how this would "prove conclusively" if certain passes were received and whatnot, but don't you really only need 1 really good angle for that?
-rant
It makes me sad to be an American when something like this develops. Joe Sixpack doesn't care about this technology when it could be used to cover newsworthy events. Hey, let's take another look at that assassination attempt to see WHO was actually firing. NO WAY, Let's make sure that the reciever made his two steps in bounds before he went out!
It is depressing when I watch someone's eyes glaze over when a football game is on. People spend entire holidays sitting on their fat asses feeding their faces and watching the same moronic game over and over again all day.
Why wasn't this developed for use by a news agency? Was it a question of funding? If so, why then does the sports dept. get that amount of funding?
American football is a children's game being played all to often by overgrown babies.
-/rant
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The goal line plane will actually be kinda cool, sort like the 1st down line they have now, but a big wall. They'll probably soon add sound effects of crashing glass sounds when they break through...
And removing other players sounds neat, but I would think that everyone out there is effecting some part of the play. Although, it could be super-sweet for training videos.
Jason
Here is a link to more info on the technical details
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~virtualized-reality/
I wonder if I could buy a bunch of Kensington webcams(which are selling on clearence at Best Buy), a big USB hub, and do my own bullet time stuff at home. Anyone? Anyone?
It actually is an advancement over the tech used in the Matrix. It is pretty cool, too - too bad I am not a huge football fan by any means.
Essentially, in the Matrix still cameras were used, all fired in sequence, aranged "around" the point of action. This "in action" panning strip was then enhanced/scrubbed with a computer to make it cleaner, and more presentable.
What is being done in the Superbowl is similar - but replace each still camera with a video camera, and feed the frames in a computer. Now, as the action is going on at the "action point", you have 33 streams, all from different angles, running and capturing frames. Now, think of these strips of frames - if you played all 33 in sync (so that frame 1 of strip A is played at the same time as frame 1 of strip B), and switched "along" the sequence of the 33 cameras, you could get full video along those points, at any angle. Or, you could show various angles (as seen from camera 27). Pan from 1 to 33, while moving the video forward, or reverse, and you have full motion panning, through time, along an arc.
Then, the CBS engineers go one step further - they have mounted all of these video cameras on robotic pan/tilt/zoom platforms - very precise platforms - all working in concert to all point at the same 3D coordinate in the stadium. I would imagine the software to be quite complex to manage all of that, to manage the calculations, the control, the capture, playback, review, etc. The system to store the video frame streams would have to be pretty huge as well, to do it all in real time, at TV quality, for over 30 streams. I mean, for one stream at 16 bit quality - 30 fps - say 640x480 video - for one second of video that would be 17 MB! Over 30 streams would be half a gig - every second! I would imagine a parallel video RAID-like system for this, to get a few seconds of video. Entirely doable, very custom, I would imagine.
I am sure these cameras can also be used in "teams" as well, or individually. I think (I could be wrong here) that the motion of the streams would cancel out the need to do real-time interpolation of the images as was done for the Matrix (which was done because the raw strip of images was very jumpy). I might be wrong about that, though (depending on how far apart the cameras are spaced would determine the jumpiness as well)...
All I can say, if what I am thinking is correct - is wow!
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
see a 360-degree stop action view of that receiver's foot on the line in the end zone.
I dont care, unless said reciever is Carrie-Anne Moss
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
The Football World Cup in France 98 (soccer for our American breven) had this technology - some off-side rulings where analysed with this technology, but after the game. What would really be cool is if the processing power existed to do this in real time, with a 3D TV standand in process which allows the viewer to rotate the camera angle anywhere they want.
Fans of EA Sports titles have enjoyed this replay facility for over 4 years now.
Revolution = Evolution
I'm 6'1" and weigh about #220. I'm not fat by any stretch of the imagination. I've been a student of Go Ju Do, Kenpo, Shotokan, Jui Jitsu and Aikido. You couldn't kick my ass if I were asleep.
Get out of your dream world, moron and realize that there are somethings that are better to get excited about than whacking off at your computer while viewing newsgroup porn, because I know you don't get no chicks with an attitude like that.
So, you get excited by watching all of those big burly men in tight shiny pants huh? I do alright in the "chicks" department. I'm no Cassanova, but I get my fair share of action.
At least football promotes all of the basic fundamentals of humanity. Violence, intelligence, strategy, teamwork, and winner takes all.
Intelligence? Dream on! Just listen to the average football player give an interview. Because they were good at running while holding a ball, or at stopping people who run while holding a ball, they got an easy time in school. They never had to learn anything because the were good at playing a game. For grown men to do irreparable damage to their bodies for a GAME is not intelligent.
I bet you got your ass beat every day you went to school because you were a whiny bitchy little wimp that couldn't hack it.
I gave more ass kickings that I got. Sometimes to dimwitted jocks.
Are you one of those Al Bundy types, who sits on the sofa all day, with one hand down his pants and the other rubbing on his fat belly, while you watch the game, talking about how you "used to play a little high school ball."?
People like you make me embarrassed to be an American.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
From the story:
Japan and the Internet. Wow. It must be cool, then.-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
I played football in highschool, but it was just a game. It's not an amalgamation of real life events and values. It's a GAME. I was also on my school's chess team. I was also on the track team.
Martial arts is not a "sport" in the traditional sense of the term.
I never got beaten up by a football player. So you can hang your pseudo psychoanalysis up, you'll never make a living at it.
The strategy of the game? Offense. Move the ball that way. Defense. Keep them from moving the ball this way. It's simple. That's why so many simpletons are enthralled by it.
Then again, you are just a troll. That's why you're anonymous.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano