Reading 1

Unit 5- Reading 1

Page 66

The dartfish olympics

POSTED BY: CLIVE THOMPSON, AUGUST 24,10:55 A.M.

If you’ve watched the most recent summer and winter Olympics, you’ve probably seen StroMotion™—the photo software that breaks an athlete’s fluid movements into stop-motion- style freeze-frames.

This fascinating software is made by the Swiss company Dartfish, and apparently Olympians have been using it to train in an incredibly innovative way. They use film footage of the performance of a past Olympic athlete and display it alongside footage of themselves. Both sequences are broken down into StroMotion™ frames.

As the Associated Press reports, pole vault star Toby Stevenson used Dartfish to virtually “compete against” a video of Sergey Bubka, the world record holder.

“I used it until smoke came out of the machine. It’s great,” said Stevenson, who won the silver medal in the 2004 Olympic men’s pole vaulting event. Stevenson could review his practice Jumps on a laptop within seconds.

Within two hours of a track meet, he was able to watch himself on an LCD projector back at the hotel. Or he had his day’s work burned onto a CD.

White Stevenson’s muscles told him one thing, the digital video might display something else. “It was a big reason for my success,” Stevenson said.

“I made a jump, and between every jump I watched my jump, and after practice I watched every jump on Dartfish.”

This reminds me of the idea of the “ghost” competition in many popular video games. I first encountered it in the original Mario Kart back in 1996: You could race around a track and then do it again, competing against a recorded. “ghost,” version of yourself.

Competing against your ghost— or that of a world-ranked competitor—is now a pretty common thing in many games. It reminds me of how game innovations have constantly pioneered techniques that are transforming how we view, and play, real-world sports.

There is some debate about whether this is a good thing.

Some famous judges—such as Cynthia Potter, a well-known diving analyst—wonder whether StroMotion™ is harming the sport. When judges use it, it might encourage them to give demerits1 for things they normally wouldn’t see. “With the naked eye. you don’t see these tiny little things that might be called deductions,” says Potter, as divers lined up for midday practice plunges at an Olympic venue.

“I don’t know if you’d even need judges if you could program alt this into a computer.’

But, she continues, “Human judges allow for artistic judgment—and allow divers to put personality in their dives.”

Of course, this isn’t an entirely new thing. The photo finish has been around for decades in many sports—and has caused huge controversies in everything from the 100-meter dash to car racing.

Modern media are likely to make things even stranger. I can easily envision the next few Olympics, since Dartfish has released a program for use on mobile devices. I imagine fans getting personalized StroMotion™ streams sent to their mobile phones, which they can view and then vote on which athlete did the best dive.

BBC SPORT USES STROMOTION™ TECHNIQUE

BBC Sport is a leader in sports broadcasting innovation and was the first network in British television to use the StroMotion™ technique.

StroMotion™ is an image enhancement technique. It creates stunning video footage displaying the evolution of an athlete’s movement, technique, execution, and tactics over space and time. Sports competition and viewing Is being changed by StroMotion™.

Television sports viewers are able to see an athletic movement, such as the line of a skier, unfold before their eyes by compounding video images into a frame-by- frame sequence. The StroMotion™ concept is based on stroboscoping, a means to analyze rapid movement so that a moving object is perceived as a series of static Images along the object’s trajectory.

StroMotion™ special effects add particular value to winter sports.

For example, the StroMotion™ technique applied to an ice skater during a jump allows us to clearly see the technique and quality of its execution by highlighting the maneuver—the preparation phase, the elevation progression, the inclination and straightness of the body, and the quality and speed of execution.

Applied to the half-pipe4 events in gravity-extreme sports such as snowboarding, skateboarding.

and skiing, StroMotion™ allows viewers to fully appreciate the technique and the quality of aerial maneuvers (spontaneity,5 elevation, landing) and highlights the different phases and their transitions.

The StroMotion™ technology is worldwide patent- protected and is exclusively available from Dartfish products and services. Among these products is another unique patented video application called SimulCam™.

With SimulCam™, whenever two athletes are competing at different times but over the same terrain (skiers, for example), their filmed performances can be combined into a single video. This video shows both competitors appearing to compete together. SimulCam’ pictures show the relative position, speed, and posture of the two competitors at each instant in a single display.

allowing for a direct side-by-side comparison of athletic performances. SimulCam™’s value for professional commentary at televised athletic events is much appreciated by experts, especially for purposes of comparing performance styles and visualizing time differences. It illustrates what one tenth of a second’s difference can mean in competition. This technology is used in a variety of sports, but it is particularly dramatic to watch during the Olympics.

There, tiny flaws made visible can keep a competitor off the medal stand.