ARKit: AR-App displays player statistics in real-time
Apple introduced a baseball app based on ARKit, which introduces digital contextual information to give users a deeper understanding of the game. Now the AR-App was presented for the first time to US journalists and was revealed how the technology works.
The application is an AR expansion of the baseball app “At Bat”, which has been the most popular sports app in the US for four years. The AR prototype shown is still in an early development phase and is not published until 2018, but it works quite well.
If you direct your iPhone or iPad camera towards the playing field, circular portraits are shown above the heads of the players. If one of the portraits is selected, statistics on the player in question are displayed in a black box at the bottom of the display. As a result, the field of view is not obscured by data.
Where does big data come from?
The information comes from a large black box called “Statcast”, which is close to the playing field and uses HD cameras, a Doppler radar, and machine learning to capture everything that happens on the field. The Statcast system uses two cameras to replicate the binocular vision of the human eye. Together, the cameras provide depth perception to easily distinguish between bodies on the field. The radar system measures the data, such as the speed and route of the players on the field. By combining the camera and radar data, dozens of physical metrics relating to every aspect of the game can be obtained, such as pitching, hitting, base running, and fielding. Statcasts are installed in all thirty major baseball stadiums.
The developers of the app are focused on finding the right balance with the amount of information presented. The user should get access to the most important data without being overwhelmed by the information flow. “We’re going to try to create the right information at the right time. We just need to figure out how to do it,” says Chad Evans, the mobile product executive with MLB Advanced Media, baseball’s interactive arm.
Evans is not afraid that the app could cause the visitors to follow the game through the display of their smartphone or tablet. According to Evans, the entertainment experience is not going to change radically, because viewers use their smartphone anyway all the time. “We want this to be fun for fans in the stands, to tell them something new about the game they can’t see on the scoreboard or have to search hard for”, said Chad Evans. “Everything is in play.”
Featured Image: MLB | Source: Techchrunch / CNET