Disney researchers, in conjunction with STATS, Queensland University of Technology and Caltech, have designed a software that makes searching databases for specific plays a whole lot easier.
Dubbed Chalkboard, the technology allows the user to search for plays by drawing them, much like how a coach would draw up a play on the sidelines. Chalkboard will be advantageous for both STATS and Disney, while its potential stretches beyond just those two organizations.
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STATS’ SportVU system is a real-time player tracking service that uses missile tracking cameras to gather comprehensive data on player speed, distance and ball possession. With Chalkboard, the teams that use SportVU, so every NBA team, will be able to quickly find any play that they need to analyze.
Disney’s hand in the matter immediately looks to extend to one of their most popular organizations—ESPN. The mass of plays that ESPN has to sort through on a daily basis should be alleviated in some capacity by Chalkboard.
Searching for plays in a database, solely by using keyword search, can be an excruciating process—yielding a mass of results to sort through. Drawing up a play should ease the process quite a bit.
The research team employed ten volunteers with a good working knowledge of basketball, and tested their retrieval precision in a keyword search versus that of Chalkboard. In every single scenario, the Chalkboard system came up with much more tailored results to what the user was searching for.
Chalkboard could be a system that is heavily used in the future of sports, seeing as the emphasis on technology and player tracking has increased the sheer amount of data that teams and organizations have at their disposal.
You can read the full research article here.