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Sports fans get spy in the stadium system |
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Sport
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Written by Peter Warren
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Sunday, 25 July 1999 |
Published Scotland on Sunday
The thrill of the football stadium could soon be brought to the living room couch via the internet.
Called telepresence by its developers Perceptual Robotics, the
technology already being installed at major baseball stadiums in the
US, allows viewers with an internet connection to take live snapshots
of great sporting events from any place in the stadium.
“From a camera behind the home plate, every spectator gets a good seat or even better ‘a player’s eye view’, said a spokeswoman.
Designed to appeal to voyeurs, techies, and sports fanatics, the
systems have proved an instant hit in the states with up to 20,000
people at any one time spending up to half an hour a time clicking
their way around hallowed sports stadia in pursuit of the arcane trivia
or close-up views possible with the system.
By using a series of up to eight computer controlled cameras
strategically placed around a sports site, the system allows those
using a specially built internet view of a stadium to select the view
they want to see at any time in a game complete with zoom instructions
and then send that demand to the camera.
Special ultra fast connections and engines allow the cameras to field
huge demands for views virtually simultaneously according to Paul
Cooper, head of the company which started only three years ago.
“I think the reason that this has been so successful is because it’s
interactive. We aren’t competing with television but we are allowing
people to do a lot of things that they can’t with the existing media.
“We’re putting people in charge of what they look at and they like it.
It’s one of the reasons that they get a sense of being there, because
they can do a lot of things that people do at an event.”
Even down to snooping around a stadium or staring at people, a voyeuristic element Cooper admits that must have some appeal.
One of the company’s major coups so far this year has been to place a
camera in the draft for the annual basketball league, which allowed
spectators to see the order in which players are picked, the sort of
detail that is guaranteed to send the average sports fan into
ecstasies.
Coupled with the equivalent of entry to the boot-room at Liverpool and
the opportunity to gaze at close-hand into the faces of sporting heroes
and lure is virtually inescapable.
“We’re providing high quality interactive still photography to
complement a game and we are already getting the sort of audiences
considered respectable for a small TV station,” Cooper added.
It is a technology, which has already provided some humbling surprises.
“We have started to get e-mails from people who are paralysed shut-ins
who have thanked us for bringing them a world they could not have hoped
to have seen,” said Cooper.
The system, which uses lap-top computers connected to the internet to
issue the demands for camera angles that are sorted out by a bank of
desk-top computers in the US, also boasts cameras in places like
Hollywood film studios and tourist attractions which have been used by
holidaymakers to plan their breaks.
Before the announcement of it plans to become the digiterazzi at this
year’s Major Baseball League, Perceptual Robotics best known coup has
been to set up an internet camera on the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem, a
camera which Cooper claims has seen an incredible traffic since going
live last year.
Televising such events has provided Cooper and his employees with a
remarkable insight into human nature, as requests by those using the
technology are mapped and retained for market research. Information,
which has helped Perceptual Robotics to rapidly learn the places to
site cameras at an event.
The company has also learnt that people are remarkably similar in the
way they snoop around an event and that it is not that cameramen at
sporting events have been instructed to be voyeurs to titillate the
audience, rather that they have been told to be themselves and find the
odd, the beautiful, the comical and the cute in much the same way as an
audience will do when the cameras are turned over to them. A trait
Perceptual Robotics has learnt to turn to its advantage.
“We can tell where people are looking, what they are looking at and
what attracts them,” said Cooper. “We can also change the web page
depending on where you are looking to move you around to something you
may be more interested in.”
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