Innovation Monitor: The technology transforming the Olympics
Innovation Monitor: The technology transforming the Olympics
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Welcome to this week’s Innovation Monitor.
Yes, the Tokyo Olympics are happening. And yes, the global pandemic that’s taken over 4 million lives around the world is still ongoing. Postponed for the first time in history, the Games have garnered headlines for its protests, politics, and controversies. But this week, we’ll turn instead towards the mind-blowing infrastructure and planning behind the Tokyo Olympics. Because amidst the most unprecedented of circumstances, athletes are competing in empty, enormous stadiums packed with state of the art tech.
Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, emerging tech has enabled new modes of viewership that simply dazzle, from underwater robotic cameras capturing swimmers and experiments in VR at the Rio games to Intel’s drone demonstrations at Pyeongchang. The most sophisticated tech has been about the equipment used to transmit it around the globe.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics are in full swing until August 8, and a closer look shows us how this year’s Games are incorporating AI, 5G, and XR to collect and convey athlete data, and offer would-be spectators and at-home audiences new ways to experience the event.
This week, we take a panoramic look at the amazing tech behind the Tokyo Olympics. In addition to live and on-demand immersive VR, and 3D athlete tracking (Intel’s 3DAT), there are fleets of autonomous vehicles (that move at 12 mph) transporting athletes to stadiums and venues, facial recognition tech for contactless security screenings, and robots of all kinds, including one that plays basketball. We’ll spotlight the Tokyo 2020 5G Project that’ll offer cool, up-close views of sailing races, as well as AR and personalized experiences for swimming and golf fans.
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Erica Matsumoto Immersion: Audio & Video Game coverage this year is being displayed in 8K UHD (ultra-HD) HDR, with 5.1.4 audio configuration. Better picture and audio quality at home is what we expect — but there’s immense work put into making the Olympic environment immersive for both athlete and viewer. According to Karl Malone, director of sound design at NBC:
“We’re always trying to tell the story, but we’re also always trying to give the listener the best seat in the house…. We’ve got microphones in the ground, underwater mics, mics underneath the ice, on people’s clothes. We’ve made things so [transparent] to the athlete that they don’t realize [the microphones] are there. We do work with microphone manufacturers, and they have developed specific microphones for sports like diving, basically picking up the vibrations of the water on the mic.”
On the visual end, until August 4, the Enoshima Yacht Harbour will sport a 50-meter 12K screen with footage of the sailing events (“spectators have traditionally watched from nearby piers with binoculars”).
This year, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and its partners pulled out all the stops for emerging tech like AI, 5G, drones, and XR.
For viewers at home with a Quest (1 or 2), NBC and Xfinity released a VR app for live and replay coverage of basketball, volleyball, boxing, and other sports, and the ability to switch camera views. NBC also features some awesome 360 coverage.
Equally impressive is the Intel True View volumetric setup: 38 high-end cameras that capture 3D video data, allowing technicians to navigate playbacks in 3D.
Meanwhile Intel’s 3D Athlete Tracking system (3DAT) sends live footage to the cloud, where a deep learning system analyzes athlete movements “and identifies key performance characteristics such as top speed and deceleration,” explains Scientific American.
“For example, during NBC’s broadcast of the 100 meter trials in Eugene, Ore., the AI showed how Sha’Carri Richardson hit 24.1 miles per hour at her peak and slowed to 20.0 mph by the time she reached the finish line. That was enough to win the race: Richardson’s runner-up hit a maximum speed of 23.2 miles per hour and slowed to 20.4 mph at the line.”
News & Entertainment Each year Intel seems to up their drone game — this year displaying a stunning earth-shaped drone show over the stadium.
And Let’s not forget Toyota’s robot basketball demo.
Outside the OBS, news publishers are using XR to spotlight the games. WaPo and USA Today are both utilizing AR to give some awesome context to the events.
USA Today has two AR experiences on its app: “One is narrated by professional skateboarder Tom Schaar, who gives a tour of the Olympic Games’ skateboarding course…. The other is narrated by USA Today reporter Tom Schad and Olympic climber Krya Condie, who explain bouldering, scoring and different types of holds.”
WaPo has three AR and experimental video experiences: “In one, Olympic climber Brooke Raboutou shoots up a 15-meter wall in about 10 seconds…. In another, Olympic skateboarder Heimana Reynolds suspends himself in the air…. In the third, Olympic surfer Caroline Marks rides a wave in a step-by-step, annotated slow motion capture video.” Athletes As NBC’s Malone previewed above, athletes are either decked out in technology or are surrounded by it during training and events. Hong Kong athletes, for example, trained on antigravity treadmills, which aren’t as sci-fi as it sounds, but have some fascinating mechanics.
Aimée Mears, a lecturer at Loughborough University’s Sports Technology Institute, describes how data analysis is used during training:
“Olympic teams use biomechanics and data analysis to quantify and examine an athlete’s technique following a coaching intervention or when returning from an injury. For example, in swimming, instrumented starting blocks and high speed video cameras are used to measure the forces and movements of a swimmer during a start”
Wearables are a big part of this data collection. According to John Barden, a professor of biomechanics, in a Conversation feature:
“One of the obvious benefits of wearable tech is its ability to provide information that wasn’t previously available. For example, force-sensing resistors placed in shoes, ski boots or bike pedals can provide a continuous stream of data for entire training sessions.”
According to SCMP, the Kenyan women’s volleyball team GPS devices provided data on “each player’s strength, heart rate and other vitals to coaches, who used the information to prevent injury and tailor the training regime to each individual.”
Wearable data can also be used to give viewers at home a sense of how unnerved — or eerily calm — an athlete is during an event. CNN World reported that the “World Archery incorporated biometric data into the television broadcast with cameras picking up the competitors’ heart rates (BPM), despite inclement weather causing technical problems on site early on.”
Finally, I just listened to this fascinating podcast from the WSJ on how the sport of surfing is leveraging AI and data analytics to predict wave conditions and optimize athlete training. Especially in a sport like surfing that is often looked at as a beautiful connection between humans and nature, there remains debate about just “how much” technology should be utilized. This Week in Innovation History
July 29, 1914: The first test call is made on the newly completed transcontinental telephone line, taking place between New York and San Francisco
For five years AT&T had wanted to link the phone lines from one side of the country to the other. The first trial took place on July 29th of 1914, when the president of the company, Theodore Vail, spoke from one coast to the other — his voice boosted in Pittsburgh, Omaha, and Salt Lake City along the way.
The really big follow-up event that you may have heard of took place a few months later on January 25, 1915. Alexander Graham Bell, sitting in NYC, phones his former assistant Thomas Watson, with whom he had shared the first phone call in history in 1876. Nearly four decades later, Watson was no longer sitting in the next room for this call — he was in San Francisco.
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