From high-end bespoke broadcasting to sports visualisation and match analysis, the potential of a new Disney-CLARITY research collaboration are far-reaching.
As the biggest entertainment organisation in the world, The Walt Disney Company is known for weaving a world of magic for children and adults alike, but what many may not know is that behind the much-loved Mickey Mouse mascot lies years of research and innovation on subjects ranging from robotics and human-computer interaction to data mining and computer vision.
Pictured above, at the official launch of the Sports Visualisation Project: Emmy Award-winning Sports Director, Artie Kempner, in the control room
When Disney Research, a business unit under Walt Disney Imagineering, began to look at the future of sports broadcasting and how advanced technology could open up new opportunities for dedicated sports channels such as ESPN (which is owned 80pc by the Walt Disney Company), it looked to the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies research centre here in Ireland.
CLARITY is a partnership between University College Dublin, Dublin City University and Tyndall National Institute, and has a group located on UCD campus. It is a Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) centre whose research focuses primarily on adaptive sensing and information discovery, and in an age where ‘too much information’ is a common complaint, it has joined forces with Disney Research to look at how sports broadcasting can take streams from multiple cameras and deliver smart, enhanced results for the sports fan as well as the coach and indeed the sports players themselves.
“The idea for the CLARITY / Disney Research collaboration had been incubating for some time: it started as a result of discussions that took place between CLARITY and Dr Joe Marks, Vice-President of Disney Research. He was aware of some of the research that we were engaged in and over time there emerged a convergence of his thinking and the research agenda of CLARITY,” explains Professor Gregory O ’Hare, Associate Professor in the UCD School of Computer Science & Informatics at UCD, and principal investigator and co-founder of CLARITY.
As part of this collaboration, O’Hare is working closely with Professor Noel O’Connor, another principal investigator who is an Associate Professor at Dublin City University, as well as Virginia Perry Smith, Producer and R&D Manager at Disney Research and Dr O’Grady of UCD who at an operational level facilitates the engagement.
Explaining what kind of research goes on at CLARITY O’Hare says: “In terms of its broad remit it is concerned with how we manage large volumes of heterogeneous streamed data coming from a variety of sensors.”
“These sensors might simply be passive infrared sensors that recognise someone moving through a door or they could be a contact sensor; reacting to a door opening, or perhaps the GPS component of your mobile phone that tracks where you are currently, or indeed could come from audio or video sensors.”
“Given that we’re getting an ever-increasing amount of sensor data in today’s world we ask questions about how to start filtering this and analysing it. How do you start to make sense of it all?”
In the case of the venture with Disney Research, CLARITY has set up multiple cameras (currently thirteen, which could potentially increase to 21) around the National Hockey Stadium situated at UCD. The data recorded from hockey matches can be relayed live to researchers at the Disney Research, Pittsburgh Lab and is also stored on servers in UCD.
“Disney researchers have direct, always-on access to this video content so they can grab it and start applying some of their algorithms”.
“Specifically in the case of the sporting arena there are a number of cameras that are positioned around the National Hockey Stadium and the trick is how to be able to understand the streams of video content that you are getting from your different video sensors”.
This could involve filtering feeds to extract desired footage or camera angles, or figuring out how to get the richest set of video input in order that it will give you the most compelling view of the action. A bank of monitors taking in all the camera feeds is collecting this data.
Could it be that sports fans get their own personalized view of a sporting event in the future? If you think about how the average sports fan likes to dissect game play over a pint with his or her mates you can imagine the experience of not only being able to stream footage of a particularly important goal or save to your mobile phone but being able to see that action from multiple angles.
“Absolutely. W hat we are really interested in is how we might be able to rapidly and dynamically segment video footage and augment or integrate it in a way to get compelling video footage of a given video incident in a sporting event – perhaps a goal scored in hockey”.
The research being carried out at CLARITY also opens up the world of micro-casting: extracting these little segments from the overall video stream and sending it in real-time to people’s mobile devices. T his is where niche sports can be not only kept alive but find a new market by offering extra functionality based on emerging technologies.
The engagement of Irish Hockey, in taking part in this research venture in and of itself will result in the shining of a spotlight on what is regarded as a somewhat niche sport in Ireland.
“There are potentially very lucrative marketing opportunities if you are able to extract and segment particular events within a sporting match and be able to stream that to, say, mobile devices,” he adds.
“In all sorts of genres of sports people want to see particular key moments. Disney Research is collaborating with us because they believe it is going to produce interesting intellectual property in the future that will give them a march on their competitors”.
The technologies that emerge from this venture will not just benefit the viewer but also the sports player and coach: “The bigger picture we are interested in is not only taking video sensing feeds from the stadium but to augment that with a myriad of other inputs.
“One of the things we’re interested in is biometric sensing: wearable sensors on the players monitoring respiratory rate, heart rate, possibly things like galvanic skin response,” explains O ’Hare.
The possibilities for the modern sports team are limitless: it could also monitor distance travelled, average speed and so on.
“In theory you could use this technology to understand not only how an individual player is performing but how they are performing as a team: the number of passes that have made and so on. For certain sports you could use the footage and placement of team mates and analyse what would have been the most penetrating pass to play at a given moment and compare it to the one that actually took place”.
“All of this rich data set could potentially offer valuable insights into the aerobic performance of an individual player”.
“One could envisage in the future that a coach sitting on the sideline could identify that exact moment when it is optimum to replace a given player.”