Category: Sport

Shirts that keep score

by the CS4FN team, Queen Mary University of London

From the archive

Basketball player with shirt in mouth
Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay 

When you are watching a sport in person, a quick glance at the scoreboard should tell you everything you need to know about what’s going on. But why not try to put that information right in the action? How much better would it be if all the players’ shirts could display not just the score, but how well each individual is doing?

Light up, light up

An Australian research group from the University of Sydney has made it happen. They rigged up two basketball teams’ shirts with displays that showed instant information as they played one another. The players (and everyone else watching the game) could see information that usually stays hidden, like how many fouls and points each player had. The displays were simple coloured bands in different places around the shirt, all connected up with tiny wires sewn into the shirts like thread. For every point a player got, for example, one of the bands on the player’s waist would light up. Each foul a player got made a shoulder band light up. There was also a light on players’ backs reserved for the leading team. Take the lead and all your team’s lights turned on, but lose it again and they went dark with defeat.

Sweaty but safe

All those displays were controlled by an on-board computer that each player harnessed to his or her body. That computer, in turn, was wirelessly connected to a central computer that kept track of winners, losers, fouls and baskets. The designers had to be careful about certain things, though. In case a player fell over and crushed their computer, the units were designed with ‘weak spots’ on purpose so they would detach rather than crumple underneath the player. And, since no one wants to get electrocuted while playing their favourite sport, the designers protected all the gear against moisture and sweat.

Keeping your head in the game

In the end, it was the audience at the game who got the most out of the system. They were able to track the players more closely than they normally would, and it helped those in the crowd who didn’t know much about basketball to understand what was going on. The players themselves had less time to think about what was on everyone’s clothes, as they were busy playing the game, but the system did help them a few times. One player said that she could see when her teammate had a high score, “and it made me want to pass to her more, as she had a ‘hot hand'”. Another said that it was easier to tell when the clock was running down, so she knew when to play harder. Plus, just seeing points on their shirts gave the players more confidence. There’s so much information available to you when you watch a game on television that, in a weird way, actually being in the stadium could make you less informed. Maybe in the future, the fans in the stands will see everything the TV audience does as well, when the players wear all their statistics on their shirts! We’ll see what the sponsors think of that…

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This blog is funded through EPSRC grant EP/W033615/1.

Bullseye! The intelligent dart board

by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

A dart in the bulls eye of a dartboard
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Mark Rober, an engineer and YouTuber who worked for NASA, has created a dartboard that jumps in front of your dart to land you the best score. Throw a dart at his board and infra-red motion capture cameras track its path, and, software (and some maths) predicts where it will land. Motors then move the dartboard into a better position to up the score in real time!

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This article was funded by UKRI, through Professor Ursula Martin’s grant EP/K040251/2 and grant EP/W033615/1.

Losing the match? Follow the science. Change the kit!

Artificial Intelligence software has shown that two different Manchester United gaffers got it right believing that kit and stadium seat colours matter if the team are going to win.

It is 1996. Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United are doing the unthinkable. At half time they are losing 3-0 to lowly Southampton. Then the team return to the pitch for the second half and they’ve changed their kit. No longer are they wearing their normal grey away kit but are in blue and white, and their performance improves (if not enough to claw back such a big lead). The match becomes infamous for that kit change: the genius gaffer blaming the team’s poor performance on their kit seemed silly to most. Just play better football if you want to win!

Jump forward to 2021, and Manchester United Manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who originally joined United as a player in that same year, 1996, tells a press conference that the club are changing the stadium seats to improve the team’s performance!

Is this all a repeat of previously successful mind games to deflect from poor performances? Or superstition, dressed up as canny management, perhaps. Actually, no. Both managers were following the science.

Ferguson wasn’t just following some gut instinct, he had been employing a vision scientist, Professor Gail Stephenson, who had been brought in to the club to help improve the players’ visual awareness, getting them to exercise the muscles in their eyes not just their legs! She had pointed out to Ferguson that the grey kit would make it harder for the players to pick each other out quickly. The Southampton match was presumably the final straw that gave him the excuse to follow her advice.

She was very definitely right, and modern vision Artificial Intelligence technology agrees with her! Colours do make it easier or harder to notice things and slows decision making in a way that matters on the pitch. 25 years ago the problem was grey kit merging into the grey background of the crowd. Now it is that red shirts merge into the background of an empty stadium of red seats.

It is all about how our brain processes the visual world and the saliency of objects. Saliency is just how much an object stands out and that depends on how our brain processes information. Objects are much easier to pick out if they have high contrast, for example, like a red shirt on a black background.

Peter McOwan and Hamit Soyel at Queen Mary combined vision research and computer science, creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that sees like humans in the sense that it predicts what will and won’t stand out to us, doing it in real time (see DragonflyAI: I see what you see). They used the program to analyse images from that infamous football match before and after the kit change and showed that the AI agreed with Gail Stephenson and Alex Ferguson. The players really were much easier for their team mates to see in the second half (see the DragonflyAI version of the scenes below).

Dragonfly highlights areas of a scene that are more salient to humans so easier to notice. Red areas stand out the most. In the left image when wearing the grey kit, Ryan Giggs merges into the background. He is highly salient (red) in the right image where he is in the blue and white kit.

Details matter and science can help teams that want to win in all sorts of ways. That includes computer scientists and Artificial Intelligence. So if you want an edge over the opposition, hire an AI to analyse the stadium scene at your next match. Changing the colour of the seats really could make a difference.

Find out more about DragonflyAI: https://dragonflyai.co/ [EXTERNAL]

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London