大象传媒

How mapping mechanical principles onto athletes could enhance sports coverage.

Project from 2011 - 2012

What we are doing

Asked how the 大象传媒 could develop its sports coverage in the run-up to the , we started to look into using the tools and techniques of .

Used by sports scientists, biomechanics applies mechanical principles to living organisms to examine the internal and external forces acting on them and the effects produced. It is a large and varied scientific field, combining the disciplines of biology and engineering mechanics to study everything from the molecular level up to entire skeletons.

We wanted to find out if these analysis techniques and tools could be used to provide new and interesting insights into the performance of athletes, which we hoped TV sports viewers would enjoy.

Outcomes

This work has already resulted in a few applications that have been used by 大象传媒 Sport. One application, made , allowed users to compare their performance with trained athletes.

And on the morning of Sunday 11 August 2012, 大象传媒 diving commentators Leon Taylor and Mishal Husain discussed British medal-hopeful Tom Daley's below-par performance, using graphics showing the size of the splash and angle of entry that came directly from our work on biomechanics. They even got about it.

How it works

The technology we have been developing first extracts information about the position of athletes and cameras from sports scenes, without using sensors or markers that might affect an athlete's performance.

We then produced tools to visualise this information for analysis during broadcast or online. The sort of statistics that result may be the power or energy being exerted by the athlete, or the angle of their movement. This builds on our previous work on sports graphics, which has been commercialised in products including the award-winning Piero system, used for analysis of sports such as football and rugby.

Finally, we are examining how we might communicate this information to the viewer, looking into what might be the most suitable medium and how to make it as appealing and interesting as possible.

We want to provide the most informative, educational and entertaining analysis of sports events that we can, by making the best use of the latest developments in areas including sports science, motion analysis, graphics and augmented reality.