baseball and sgi application

[DanKarron at UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU]

Here is an interesting application that got covered in the New York Times
sunday Biz Technology section (1/2 page). I append my digest. All typos are 
my own, not the New York Times.
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Tracking the Path of the Perfect Pitch with 3-D Graphics

New York Times, Sunday, April 28, 1990. Page 9 Business Section.

Does the famous rising fast ball actually exist ? Tommy Lasorda, the Los
Angeles Dodgers manager believes that it does. Not all baseball aficionados
agree. After all, the idea that a pitcher can hurl a blazingly fast pitch that
will defy gravity and not drop as fast as it should is a little hard for
some people to swallow.

But a new 3d comp. graphics system developed by Sportsight Inc. of Irvine,
Ca. has cast a new light on the question. Sportsight's system, which the
company calls Supervision, works like this: Two video camera are placed behind
and to each side of home plate. The camera capture 60 images a second
of every pitch thrown.

The video info is then fed into a series of computers(sic) that calculate the
baseball's trajectory, speed , lateral movement and other data. This information
is send to a Silicon Graphics work stations, which renders a 3d image a
few seconds later. The pitcher, his coach, or a television sportscaster at a
game, and the viewers, can see what kind of pitch was thrown, where it 
'broke' if it was a curve, where it passed in relation to the batter and his
strike zone - even how well the umpire called the pitch.

"It's an exercise in ballistics, like tracking a missile as it moves
through space," said Donald Johnson, exec vp of Sportsight, a start-up company
that began working on the system three years ago.

Once the visual data about the pitch is captured, the Sportsight system can
manipulate the image in a variety of ways. It can show the pitch from the
pitchers viewpoint or from that of the catchers. Grids the computer places
along side the image help quantify just how much pitch deviations vertically or laterally from its desired path.

 ... 

The basic Sportsight systems costs from 200,000 to 400,000 dollars, which is
likely to restrict the market to professional sports teams and tv networks.

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Makes baseball like Patriot missles! 

Thought you guys in this news group would like this one.

Cheers!

dan.



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