LOTS OF VIDEO
Video analysis, which is critical at the world-class level, is being
heavily employed in the run-up to the Olympics. In fact, national
coaches of U.S. teams and specialists in video analysis have conducted
performance technology workshops for seven years, mostly
at the U.S. Olympic Training Complex in Colorado Springs.
More recent working sessions used a system developed by
Dartfish USA Inc., mostly to record precision comparisons and
contrasts of performances. Almost all Olympic athletes, including
those in track and field, gymnastics, softball, and taekwondo,
are going with Dartfish technology.
“This tool will help take taekwondo
to the next level,” says U.S.
men’s head coach Jean Lopez. “It’s a
great tool for instant feedback and in
scouting opponents.”
Using the Dartfish system, athletes are
filmed with a digital camera—typically
by a coach—and the film is fed into computers
for picture-by-picture analysis.
Sequences can be overlaid with reference
film to show differences in performance.
Swimming coaches have also been using
underwater cameras to record swimmers
being towed through the water to test
slightly different body positions to minimize drag and improve
speed. Another visual technique is to have kayakers use special
training goggles to show their vital statistics in real time as they’re
training, including heart-rate data.
AND THE 2012 GAMES?
London officials have already said they expect the cost of staging
the 2012 Olympic Games at about $3.7 billion, higher than their
previous estimate of $2.8 billion.
Will there be “faster” swimsuits in the 2012 Olympic Games?
Speedo and its competition are working on it. Will the new Omega
starting blocks for swimmers that got nixed for this year’s Games
be used in 2012? We’ll probably see something even better.
Swimmers are already improving their form with software from
the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Aquatics Research and
Education. The software provides instant and detailed feedback
on a swimmer’s glide technique and even suggests ways swimmers
can improve their posture to help reduce drag.
Swimmers are marked on their body joints using water-resistant
markers. Underwater video cameras record them swimming,
and the images are fed into a computer that tracks the markers
through the water. The image is overwritten with graphs and
charts indicating where improvements are possible.
Aside from the competition, Texas Instruments has already
produced a white paper that looks at the 2012 Olympic Games,
called “The Wireless World in 2012: A Day at the London Olympics
2012.” It’s authored by TI’s Alan Gatherer, chief technology
officer for Communications Infrastructure, and Sandeep Kumar,
strategic marketing manager, Communications Infrastructure.
Gatherer and Kumar believe technical issues that seem daunting
now will likely be resolved by 2012. Even more interesting,
they say in their paper, will be the changes that occur in business
models as channel bandwidths increase in scale and more content
providers have ready access to them.
The most significant change to the wireless network at the
2012 Olympics will be the merger of voice-centric cellular with
circuit-switched delivery in real time, and data-centric wireless
local-area networks (WLANs) with IP-based packet-switched
delivery into a single data network.
With that at least as a starting point, Gatherer and Kumar see
attendees of the London Games using 4G cell phones and PDAs
for just about everything, including finding their way through
the London traffic, security alerts, and accessing local wireless
networks for closeups and replays of Olympic events streamed to
their mobile devices.
“Eventually, all air interfaces will support general voice, video
and data applications,” TI says. “Range, bandwidth, and available
service offerings will make the difference as to which type of network
works best for a specific use. The networks probably won’t be
fully merged by 2012, but they will be well on their way.”
With all of the security anticipated during the Beijing Olympics,
technology four years from now will make the London
Games a different experience. There will be entirely new ticketing
and ID systems for officials, athletes, and spectators, possibly
using a mobile authentication system developed by Nokia, and it
may be the first cashless Olympics.
Still, Andrea Simmons, a member of the British Computer
Society’s security group, has already expressed concerns in interviews
with the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) that there has
not been enough open discussion about what technology will be
needed for the London Games in 2012.
The London Games may also provide an opportunity to build
a stadium from the ground up, designed with the athletes’ performance
in mind. CFD simulations of new sports stadiums are
being built to determine how earthquake-proof they are, and how
to improve heating and air-conditioning systems.
This resembles the work of Olof Granlund Oy, Finland’s leading
building services consulting firm, when it designed new indoor
ice hockey arenas in Russia. In fact, Ansys software was used on
a nonlinear analysis of the pre-stressed truss shell roof structure
of the Beijing Table Tennis Arena. This hybrid tension structure
was assessed for pre-stresses, nonlinear buckling, and the roof ’s
ultimate bearing capacity.
The next step, Ansys believes, may be to design sports arenas
that consider how air flowing through a stadium affects the actual
performance of the athletes, such as javelin and discus throwers,
and even runners.
“In the next 10 years, CAE and multiphysics design tools will
likely become one of a number of staple products used to design
and construct better, more innovative and impactful sports stadiums
around the world,” says Keith Hanna, Ansys’ European
marketing director. “Advances in computer hardware and software
will make engineers’ lives easier.”
Hanna also expects CFD to develop further, providing a greater
understanding of the underlying fundamental flow and transport
phenomena going on in most sports in real-world, real-time, complex,
thermal, and multiphase situations.