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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.
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...
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
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!
Evidently 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
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!
"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.