The Augmented Reality America’s Cup
In June 2010, the Oracle team hired the two of us to develop the tracking, telemetry, and augmented-reality system for the races. We are both electrical engineers, and one of us (Honey) is a professional sailor who competes in elite races. We have a long history in applying augmented reality to broadcast sports. Our past projects include the yellow first-down line now ubiquitous in televised American football, the tracking system now used in NASCAR and other motor races, and the ESPN K Zone system used to track and show a baseball’s path in the vicinity of the strike zone. ...
Making a sailing race as easy to follow as a football game starts with defining the playing field. On the live video, we’re superimposing lines that delineate the course boundaries along with a “ladder” of 100-meter lines. If two boats are on the same “rung” of the ladder, they have the same upwind or downwind distance to sail to the next buoy-marked gate or mark. With these lines as guidance, even a viewer new to sailing can quickly see which boat is in the lead. We’re also marking an area extending three boat lengths out from each gate with a yellow polygon. When boats enter this yellow zone, race rules aimed at defining which boat has the right of way determine which boat can take the shorter, inside turn through a gate. That’s why we’re identifying the entire zone, not just the gate itself.
...At a glance, a viewer will be able to tell not only which boat is in the lead but also by how much, whether and how fast another boat is gaining on the lead boat, and whether competitors are taking similar or different approaches to the next gate.
...If we tag a boat with a supplemental graphic, it must appear to travel smoothly with that boat. ...So we had to develop a system that could reliably give us location data to within 2 centimeters.
See the full story here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-augmented-reality-americas-cup
