Seattle Sounders FC’s Director of Soccer Analytics believes video review will soon be powered by optical tracking, infrared technology, and augmented reality.
At an event hosted by N3XT Sports in Barcelona last week, the Sounders’ analytics head, Ravi Ramineni, envisioned a future in which sports franchises operate with technological infrastructure that’s as robust as that at major tech companies like Google. Teams will be able to leverage sophisticated augmented reality technologies that will enable players to relive their experience on the field so they can better learn from the decisions they made during games, he said.
“To me, augmented reality will have a lot of uses in the future because what happens is a lot of times what you see if you’re watching the game on video, at a wide angle, is not what the player is seeing,” said Ramineni. “I think that’s the angle you would get if you had augmented reality technologies. If you can get enough data about the player’s positioning of his body, then you can reconstruct that with the position of the ball and say ‘This is what was your line of vision when you were passing this ball.’ Then you can actually say whether he saw both options or not or was the defender covering him.”
Implementing such intensive technology will require more high-fidelity data, which is costly to record. But Ramineni said optical tracking and infrared technologies are already helping to provide more accurate data, and that will eventually lead to a wider adoption of augmented reality. And he believes those advances will be “coming through in the next few years.”
“Think about having billions of rows of data and having to be able to render that in a video with the click of a button. To serve that speed, I think that’s where you’re looking at technologies that, for example, search companies use to serve queries—that level of infrastructure is needed,” Ramineni said. “AR is probably the application, but then that needs so much infrastructure so there’s a lot of work that needs to be done with that. They’ll all come together.”
The Sounders have already started to adopt optical tracking over GPS because they found it to be more accurate within the limits of their arena, CenturyLink Field. The design of the stadium, which is also home to the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, detracts from the accuracy of GPS.
“In our stadium, which has very tall stands, it’s hard to use GPS because for GPS to work well it has to triangulate with eight different satellites to locate one position of the player. So if they can’t triangulate with eight satellites, the data quality won’t be as good,” he said. “We were missing a lot of that in our stadium so we had to use something different, and that’s why we use an optical tracking technology.”
Optical tracking alone isn’t enough to power augmented reality. But sports franchises and soccer clubs are continuing to invest in technologies that allow them to better track players and the ball. Ramineni believes a mix of optical and infrared tracking, combined with a more complex data architecture will eventually enable teams to take their training analysis three-dimensional.