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The Technology Behind the Magic Yellow Line
CurtMonash writes "Fandome offers a fascinating video explaining how the first-down line on football broadcasts actually works. Evidently, theres a lot of processing both to calculate the exact location being photographed on the field — including optical sensors and two steps of encoding — and to draw a line in exactly the right place onscreen. For those who don't want to watch the whole video, highlights are here."
Hmmm... A new trend? No longer reading 'have not RTFA' but 'have not Viewed TFA'? /. coming to.
Dear oh dear, what is
I already knew in pretty significant detail how all this works, but there was a lot of additional information in the video that never made it to the PR-sanitized behind-the-scenes descriptions of the technology.
Plus, you get to see the ugly UI that appears to have been built as an afterthought - just like the UI of all the other industrial television software I've operated.
Would be a field that uses clear/transparent turf. and all colors on the field are defined by lights under it. The white in the 10/20/30... could be done dynamically, the end zones could be designed dynamically and relit, heck, you could switch from a green field to Boise State's blue.
This could be used to make the same field a football field, soccer field, lacrosse, field hockey... all without the the clutter of all the lines on one field.
This might be tricky with turf technology currently, but I feel like a first technology to do this might be a basketball court (lights for basketball, volleyball, etc)...
It probably isn't feasible, but would be interesting.
The yellow line is one thing, but TV sports have become the forefront for real-time image manipulation, mostly for the purpose of inserting advertisements.
Personally I hate that trend. Luckily for me, pro sports was already becoming so infested with commercialism that I stopped being interested after adolescence.
But how long before this kind of b.s. makes it into non-sports television? "The Obama inaugural, brought to you on the capitol mall by ..."
TFS made it sound like the video was an entire documentary that was going to eat at 30 minutes out of my morning. So yes, in the interests of saving time I clicked the highlights link, only to find that it would have taken longer to read the highlights than it would have to watch the video!
Seriously, three and a half minutes? Do we at Slashdot have that short an attention span that we need highlig... OH LOOK A BIRD!
That's true, but I was always more fascinated by the stuff they did for NASCAR. Not only do they use on-screen tech, but they also make use of GPS to do those fancy graphics showing info on the cars while they're moving on the road.
There was an article about this particular tech NASCAR uses in some magazine, but I can not for the life of me remember it, nor can I find any videos demonstrating it...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I read somewhere that it was named football because it is played on your feet, rather than something like polo which is played on the back of the horse...
Therefore nothing to do with which bit of the body comes in contact with the ball.
However being a Brit, I've got to agree with the parent, and am therefore posting as anonymous to mod myself down.
And it was awesome that Pixar reproduced these glitches in the opening scenes Cars.
Actually, I remember watching a Packers game a while back, and seeing the yellow line "paint over" some of the players in their green uniforms. It was probably a few years ago now, so they've probably improved it since, but it caught my eye then - and gave me a clue as to how they did it.
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
The reason we use base 10 is b/c we have 10 fingers. If we had 13 fingers, we'd operate in base 13 natively (hmmm.... there's a good thought experiment... what would be some outcomes of operating in a prime base?).
And your comparison is bad.
Quick, what's 125234380034 in base 12 multiplied by 12
What's 125234380034 in base 12 multiplied by 10
What really brought it home (so to speak) for me was baseball. If you look carefully, occasionally you can notice that the advertising behind the batter doesn't quite move with the rest of the frame when the camera shakes. While the yellow line couldn't be taken as really existing, you could believe the advertising was actually on the wall.
While that's harmless enough, it shows that convincing covert alterations in real time are also possible.
I'm a big fan of metric, but I can still see a lot of sense on imperial units, even though I don't use them a lot except for the conventions that have survived like time measurement. There are some really weird units, but imperial's major strength is that its most common units tend to be ones that are handy for tasks that people deal with from day to day. 12's a great number because it divides by so many different whole numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12). If you have 12 of something, it'll be very versatile for being evenly split up in small groups of many sizes. This is why so many things come in 12s or similar multiples.
I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, but I'd guess that the whole '12' thing is probably also why days are historically divided into 24 hours. It makes it really easy to divide a day into discrete blocks when doing basic mathematics, which is the kind of maths most people do. Divisions of 60 are just another convenient multiple.
As for 12 hour clock-faces, it's probably just much easier to read a clock face that's divided into 12 than into 24 because the gaps between the numbers on a 12 hour clock are bigger. Even if the hands go around twice in a day, you'd nearly always be able to figure out the time based on what you already know about the day so far. There are still some annoyingly ambiguous terms that are common, like 'midnight' being used to describe both the beginning and end of a day. (If someone says 'midnight Saturday', I don't know for sure what they actually mean.)
Circles are probably divided into 360 degrees because it's a very divisible number that's very close to the number of days in a year. Every night the sky and everything in it will have moved about 1/360th of a circle from where it was at the same time the previous night, before returning to where it started. If you don't have a lot of accurate measuring and construction equipment, it's still easy to divide a circle into 360 parts (a few straight lines are easily derivable locations). If you make such a circle and line it up with things in the sky, you could figure out the day of the year relatively easily to quite an accurate amount.
There is such a thing as Metric Time, but it never really took off with the rest of the metric system.
Personally I still think it's important to have systems that work in people's heads for everyday tasks, just because people aren't computers. Metric's a nice compromise for me. I've wondered for a while what it might be like if the principles of the metric system were applied to base 12 instead of base 10. Maybe you're right, and 16 would be a better option just because we have so many computers around, but as long as most people aren't directly dealing with computer implementation, they're most likely to fall back to a number that's most directly obviously useful to them. 12 is a smaller number than 16 and it divides by more whole numbers, so it wins on two counts.