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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.
Yeah - it is one guy and as long as he doesn't put on an annoyingly green tie - it all just works. It is actually amazing how much technology is behind simple video effects done seamlessly. I thought it was funny when Forest Gump won the oscar for special effects - everyone was like... that isn't a special effects movie... I was like - that is the point
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
are the ones on the platforms at train stations. (In QLD anyway) The closest thing we have to this in sports around here is either during swimming, or between balls during a test match, when the commentators are bored and start drawing lines all over my TV.
I thought Football was a game played with your feet! What the article discusses is a bastardised form of Rugby.
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)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh9af_gXxlM&fmt=18
Can't we just call it genuine curiosity ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
... All that technology applied to paint a yellow line in a completely arbitrary position. The rules need to be changed so that the location of the ball touching the ground is the location of the line. Also, the ball should have some kind of RFID chip in it, and the entire field should be built on top of a fine mesh of RFID sensors. Until then the location of the line is subject to too much human error, and as a result completely arbitrarily placed anyway.
While I do agree it is marketing, I don't know that I would put it in the 'dumbing down' category. I think it is there to get the TV viewers more involved. Watching the game is more exciting when you can immediately see if a play was successful or not (like you could if you were at the game). Without the line, either the cameras must use a wide shot so you can see the sideline markers, or you must wait for an indication from the ref (or announcers) as to whether the play was successful or not.
"First of all, when someone writes "football" on slashdot. Is he referring to what is commonly known as "football" all over the world, i.e. "soccer" or what is commonly referred to all over the world as "american football"?"
Sometimes a single word has more than one meaning, especially among different cultures. When that is the case, you have to use something called context to derive which meaning the word has. So "football" could mean a few different things when written on Slashdot depending on who wrote it. Lucky for us, we're given a LOT of context here. Given that we're talking about first down lines and there's ample video showing the sport in question, the context should be pretty obvious. But since you're confused, what they're referring to would likely translate to "American football" in your vernacular.
And it was awesome that Pixar reproduced these glitches in the opening scenes Cars.
People should be doing everything from measurement to arithmetic in hexidecimal (base 16) these days. SI is obsolete in the information age. Although it might be nice to replace the abcdef numerals with something non-alphabetic.
Seriously.
You can draw all the same arguments that were made for the metric system and apply then to why we should switch everything to base 16.
Floating-point operations are generally performed on a base-2 representation of a base 10 number, so conversion errors are common. Base-10 floats or decimal types are possible, but less commonly used and generally don't have CPU hardware support.
Base-16 can represent larger values in a shorter space.
Computer memory is based on address lines that follow the powers of 2, so that a 'kilo' byte is 1024... of course people are just starting to collectively address this issue with the use of KiB.
While we are at it, why do we still have 24-hour days, or worse 12-hour half-days where the 0 hour is actually 12 and proceeds to 1. Why are there 360 degrees in one rotation? Arc seconds, arc-minutes... Why is a dozen 12 units?
Of course I'm just playing devil's advocate here. I know most non-computer science people out there would have their head spinning if they tried to understand anything besides base-10.
The traditional system of measurement that exists here rarely causes significant difficulties in every day life.
200g of steak mince per person. 17 people. I'll have 3400g please.
6oz of steak mince per person. 17 people. 102oz... but I can't ask for that. How many pounds?
Large bottle of vodka: 1 litre. 1000mL. Double measure: 50mL. Bottle has 20 double measures.
Normal bottle: 0.75L. 15 double measures.
I think you buy vodka in a "fifth", a fifth of a gallon, and I think a double measure would be 2 fluid ounces. Erm...
My wall: 4.37m by 2.39m. Area: 4.37m*2.39m = 10.4m^2. The can of paint covers 10m^2, damn.
Your wall: 14 feet 4 inches by 7 feet 10 inches. Area... 172in * 94in = 16168 square inches ~= 112 square feet. The paint covers 10 square yards, is there enough? (No)
I don't really see how the benefits would outweigh the costs of forcing people to switch over. Many things are already labeled with both sets of units anyways.
Due to pressure from the EU ;-).
I have a set of SI wrenches and a set of "standard" wrenches.
That's twice as many wrenches as you'd need if everything came with one system of fixings.
Scanning the image lets the computer know the exact pixel for each yardline at various pan, tilt, and zoom points, from which it can then correctly interpolate for all the movements. With enough computer power, scanning the image would be all that is needed and the sensors would be moot.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What possible difference could it make whether or not you can personally directly measure the base units?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
And really, if you've lived with non-metric units all your life, it is easy. I have no problem knowing what size and 8 oz tenderloin or 16oz strip steak is or how big it is. I'd be completely lost trying to, off the top of my head...buy or cook with metric units. When I college in a lab, sure, no problem in doing chemistry experiments in metric, but, that isn't real every day life stuff.
I know how to dress when it is 72F outside. I'd have no clue what to dress for at something like 32C (random temp)...
A handy guide to converting to metric.
Not being a sports fan, I don't see much of this stuff, but I once visited the company in Silicon Valley that makes the gear. The "yellow line" is one of the easier applications. It's basically a camera with encoders driving a fairly simple video processor. Calibration is manual; there's a setup display that shows the normal lines of a football field, and someone aligns the corners to match the real image from the camera. When the generated image matches the real one, the system is in alignment.
That's 1998 technology. The newer systems have gone way beyond that. Ads on billboards are sometimes replaced using the same system. Ads you see on the air may not be what people in the stadium are seeing. There's player tracking, ball tracking, the "virtual strike zone" for baseball, GPS-based tracking for NASCAR, and virtual billboard insertion into everything.
From my perspective, it is sufficiently advanced technology to be regarded as magic. Of course, I haven't watched TFA.
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
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.