The Augmented Reality America's Cup 33
First time accepted submitter Tekla Perry writes "In 'The Augmented Reality America's Cup' Stan Honey and Ken Milnes describe the positioning, communications, graphics, and augmented reality technology they developed that will be used in the upcoming America's Cup races and, they hope, will change the way sailing is televised and watched forever after. Honey and Milnes pioneered car navigation with the startup Etak, and changed the way we watch football on TV with Sportvision's yellow line."
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Next time I feel like pinning the blame for a bombing on some kid who likely committed suicide weeks before the event [wikipedia.org], I'll be sure to. Thanks!
And loving it... (Score:2)
Re:Might as well just upload it all to the cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you missed the point. The race will be run as usual. The presentation to the viewers on TV and online will be 'enhanced' so you can see features of the course not clearly visible. Or as in the case of wind direction, invisible. Its like the first down yellow line in football. Sure, you can see the sideline marker. But where the play is taking place on the field relative to some invisible line is made more clear by the graphics.
Re:Might as well just upload it all to the cloud (Score:4, Interesting)
It gets better than that.
watching the Louis VItton cup the races themselves could be boring but I literally watched the race on Youtube and used my nexus tablet to watch the virtual race at that same time.
i was watching the race from two different points of view one of which i could control to get Virtual but better camera angles and the other from the TV broadcast. I could see positions of the competitors distance to marks, etc. I could also see the obvious tactical problems where the competitors could have done something different.
I for one welcome our robot yacht-enabled ... (Score:1)
I for one welcome our robot yacht-enabled overlords as they race using green technology and relay doctored information back to us for bread and circuses.
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This isn't sailing, it's a contest of technology and money.
Nobody's watching (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? This is a race where Larry Ellison had to pay other teams to race against him. Turns out people don't want to watch some billionaire's ego trip just because it's presented in a sports format.
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And to top it off, Larry Ellison's Oracle team has been caught cheating... http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/26/us-sailing-americascup-cheating-idUSBRE97P0LD20130826 [reuters.com]
Ellison is real piece of work.
This technology has been around for many years (Score:4, Informative)
Animation Research Limited in New Zealand pioneered this way back in 1992 for the America's Cup in San Diego. It was revolutionary, what's in the article above is just evolutionary.
Some pix I could find of the original, seem to be not many around:
http://arl.co.nz/index.php/arl-news/131-what-does-it-take-to-be-world-class [arl.co.nz]
http://arl.co.nz/index.php/arl-company/arl-history [arl.co.nz]
Here is was Animation Research Limited are working to today:
http://virtualeye.tv/index.php/the-sports/virtual-eye-sailing [virtualeye.tv]
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While this is neat and takes lots of sensors as well, they create 100% CGI views by virtual cameras.
This article however is about real-time augmented reality overlays on live video
shot from boats and helicopters. That's a lot more impressive.
Sailing? (Score:2)
People actually watch sailing in any numbers? I thought it was mostly something TV stations showed to be able to sell advertising slots to Rolex, who value the eyeballs of the 0.1%.
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Amazing technology (Score:1)
These boats are truly incredible. 3-4 times wind speed, 55mph top speed, 7 tonnes and rigid wings the size of a 747 wing. They are racing at speeds that would have held the all-comers sailing speed records 20 years ago.
The americas cup is the oldest internationally contested sporting competition in world, and is a lot like F1 where winning means you need to have a combination of great drivers, great fund-raisers and great engineers - so there are a ton of elements to combine on and off the water that help
$8 million robots (Score:2)
The last meaningful America's Cup races were held in the late '80s. Somebody squinted hard enough at the 12-meter rules and entered a multi-hull. Now it's just a matter of who spends the most money on a carbon fiber boat with a wing sail. This is a sailing race of fundamentally unseaworthy vessels. It would be literally be safer to cross an ocean in a dinghy than in one of these monstrosities.
Come September, do yourself a favor. Watch Deep Water on Netflix. Read any book on Ernest Shackleton. Read any Lin
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Somebody squinted hard enough at the 12-meter rules and entered a multi-hull.
Nope, the Kiwis (Michael Fay) were pretty pissed off with Dennis Connor for accusing them of cheating by entering "Plastic Fantastic" [wikipedia.org], and so under the Deed of Gift challenged them to a match in 90ft yachts (the largest allowed), Dennis Connor entered a multi and the Kiwis went with the Big Boat - it was a disaster, similar to the "match" 22 years later.
I agree with the sea worthiness bit, but at least ETNZ can suffer a 30kt deceleration in 2s [youtube.com] with very little to show (torn trampoline and damaged fairing).
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That is certainly one way to look at it; another is that Conner acted the complete douche and, through bad behavior, humiliated himself, the US and the spirit of the race by whining after being beaten fairly and decisively, then used "American Smarts" to weasel waterline lengths to build and campaign what he thought would be a "face-saver" that turned out to be another US humiliation, as he figuratively had his crew dragging their feet in the water in an effort to under-sail a high performance multi against
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Don't get me wrong, I think Dennis Connor was a complete dickhead - I was just trying to be a bit more impartial that I had to be. Unfortunately, OTUSA appear to be doing a Connor and trying to manipulate the rules (Ruddergate & Weightgate), and what's novel is that Coutts (the man who took the Cup back from Connor) is the man who is dragging it down.
Yes, using match racing production hulls would vastly improve the competition, but the AC (like Formula One) is supposed to be about development which excl
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Anyhow, I think we might be on the wrong forum.
Agreed. Perhaps one day we'll cross wakes in the "roaring forties", heave to and share a libation or two. Now, that would be a story!
America's Cup technology (Score:1)