Slashdot Mirror
New Devices Help Track Olympic Winners
Darren writes "Athletes are going faster, higher and longer and as a result the technology that measures their feats at the Olympics needs to keep up. As a result a number of new devices to help track winners, losers at the Games have been developed, including microchips on marathon runners' shoes, ultrasensitive touch pads in the pool, radar guns at the beach volleyball and cameras that take 1000 images per second."
Putting RFID chips on your shoes is nothing new. All of the local races down here use ChampionChip timing, unless they're really small. Have done for years, too. There's a local company, Run-Far who times most of the races as well - you run over mats at the start, finish, and useful places in the middle. Works pretty well.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Actually, I think you'll find the sabres used don't have a sharp edge, so it would be bruising rather than bloodletting.
a combination of well calibrated sensitivity and wet-road-tire-like grooves prevents the water from activating them.
from the article: Matsport relied on some rather amazing high-tech timing and scoring technologies this year, including a FinishLynx® high-speed digital finish line and timing camera system, produced by Lynx System Developers, Inc., of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and an AMB Activ transponder timing system, produced by AMB-it, Heemstede, Netherlands
There is also a really nifty diagram about halfway through the article, showing how the AMB Activ Transponder timing system works.
Not directly Olympics-related, but since we were on the topic of new technology used to measure athletes...
Actually other then the fact that the fencing equipment in the olympics is wireless, there isn't much new to the electronic sensors. Fencing was one of the first sports to benefit from electronics due to the extreme speed of the action (sabre fencing is the fastest martial art in the world).
Even with the sensors, an extremely skilled judge (called a director in fencing) is required to determine which competitor is considered the agressor and has 'right-of-way' to see who gets the point.
On a side note, as a long time fencer actually getting to watch the sport in the olympics for the first time I realised one thing. It is a really bad spectator sport if you do not know the sport yourself. I watched the events on tv with family and friends and unless they showed a slow motion replay, people were just at a loss as to what happened (unless they were fencers themselves).
The lighted masks are an attempt to make the sport more spectator friendly. They're not used outside of the Olympics.
The jackets are simply a lame (luh-may, as in woven metal, not lame as in dorky) and used as part of a fairly simply electrical scoring system since the 30's (for foil) and later for other weapons. (since the 60's for sabre IIRC)
The weapons are not sharp, but they are either squarish or triangular so the way they hit would certainly cause bleeding welts if on bare skin. The jackets are also made from a very tightly woven material made to resist punctures from the occasional broken blade.
Coincidentally, that match also was also the venue for the most disgusting display of "sportsmanship" (or lack thereof) I've seen outside an NFL end zone. Immediately after the match Touya ran around holding his saber like a machine gun and mimed "shooting" Smart several times. Personally I think he should have been tossed out and stripped of his standing at that point. (And no, not because he's French or something stupid like that. Note that I compared him to the NFL, I think those players should be tossed too)
once upon a time, events were measured down to the thousandth. in one race, 400 meter IM about 30 years ago i believe, the time separating the winner to the runner up was 0.003 seconds - about 3 millimeters. after that, it was argued that the variation in the flatness of the touch pad/pool wall would cause differences so small - hence swimming governing body decided to use the time only down to the hundredth, and consider the race tied if same to the hundredth.
i once tied another swimmer in a 1000 yard race. i thought i had beaten him because my name came up first on the scoreboard, but it turns out we had tied. i checked the computer printout and it turns out i had beaten him by 0.005 s - so my name did come up first for a reason.
"It'd also be interesting to know how far from the athletes the gun is located and if sound travel speed can have an impact on things (how is the electronic system synchronized to the gun? via sound? some other way?)"
There is a mic or some other sensor attached to the starter pistol linked up to mini-loudhalers sitting directly behind each athlete so every competitor hears the start at precisely the same time. They've been doing this for a long time.
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Actually .. it was the 1982 World Championships.
:)
Snagged from fencing.net
The drive for safer fencing was prompted by the 1982 tournament death of the Soviet champion Vladimir Smirnov. During an encounter at the Rome World Championships, a blade broke and penetrated Smirnov's mask, mortally wounding him. It remains one of fencing's few tragedies, notable in part because it was so exceptional, and it galvanized the world fencing community to adopt higher standards for equipment.
In a related story - fencing is fun, safe, and you should try it (choose foil though - it's the thinking man's weapon
that article is so behind it's not funny.. here's the e-mail I sent the columnist..
t m
so 1996 was not the first time for color, but maybe the first time IN THE OLYMPICS for color. I worked for Lynx from 1997-1999 as a sales rep. I've had my camera since '97 and it has always been able to do 2000 lines/sec so your 2004 timeline is way off. However, in 2004, Lynx has just released their professional camera capable of taking up to 10000 lines/sec for things such as auto racing. Surf thier site a bit and you'll get a better grip on it.
your article on Digital photofinish timing info is slighlty incorrect. Most FAT (fully automatic timing) systems used at anything above a college meet will do 2000 lines/sec like the camera I own. Thats not to say that they aren't using only 1000 of them, just not likely. Your timeline is off as well. 1992, true as listed In 1995, Lynx System developers had color cameras as you can see from thier newsletters: http://www.finishlynx.com/lynx/newsletters/body.h
and a short synopsis to curb your curiosity: A transducer (sensitive microphone) triggers the timer, either by wire or radio-encoded wireless signal. The timer is inside the camera. The camera has an image sensor just like your digial camera except it's only 1 pixel wide. You align it on the leading edge of the finish line, not just the leading 8mm of it or whatever it said. It scans the line at whatever rate I choose. Usually, I don't go below 1000/sec. The 100m will get a 2000/sec setting for elite runners. As for blocks, Reaction times are measured differently depending on who makes the system. Lynx's system is different than Seiko's or Omega's. But the speakers on the blocks are there to minimize the advantage lane 1 has in hearing the gun before lane 9 does.
If they had a chip in the shoe, it would be for tracking them in long runs, like the Marathon, or the 20 Km and 50 Km Race Walk.
The rules say the torso is the body part that stops the clock and determines the winner, not the head, arms or LEGS, making it unusable to put them in the shoes. Maybe the front of the shoulder or in the number id for each athlete.
And there's the issue of the scanning speed, also, as mentioned elsewhere.
"It seems that every Olympics the margin between Gold, Silver and Bronze gets smaller and smaller."
Besides noting a single excrutiatingly close race, would be nice if you could point to something empirical before espousing this broad stroke.
I dunno, watched the 400 swimming relay, U.S. won by 3 seconds. Saw the U.S. womens softball team outscore opponents by 57-1 or something.
If you look at the finish line, you might notice a small flickering box at the side of the track. Look at it closer (use slow motion if necessary), and you'll notice that it's actually a fast scrolling swatch ad, nothing virtual there. Thus the line scan camera sees different parts of the ad.
And, if the ad moves at a steady pace, it can also be used as an alignment pattern to fix possible timing fluctuations in the line camera.
Before the advent of digital technology, they still had a finish photo that looked almost exactly the same as the digital ones.
They used a camera without a traditional shutter, but with a very narrow slit instead. The film, marked with time marks, moved along continuously (instead of one step at a time as with normal photographs). The narrow slit projects the same area of the finish line onto the film as is captured by the narrow CCD of the digital version.
I don't know how the film was synchronized though. The simplest would be that the film starts rolling at the time the starting gun is fired, but that would wast lots of film.
The whole thing worked just fine, but had the disadvantage that you had to develop the film before you could see the result.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.