Great example of observing something that the community is doing (these kind of gifs are all over Twitter and sports blogs) and building a tool to make it easy. I love seeing these kind of "organic" features.
I hate it because I don't like fun,* but it's still genius. Also, it's only a matter of time before crowdsharing of video taken by spectators at games allows for a full 3d reconstruction of the entire game action. You have tens of thousands of people at an NFL game, the field is a fixed quantity, and you only need maybe 10 people filming the same action at any given time to accurately model everything that goes on.
* what I really mean is that most animated gifs sorta suck in my view; obviously I'm in a minority on this.
Though, the NFL already has 3D reconstruction technology called FreeD. Cowboys Stadium installed 12 4k cameras around each endzone. Using those points of view, they can construct a point-cloud and render a replay with arbitrary camera movement in 30 seconds.
30 seconds today suggests to me that in a few years it will be available for instant replay, instead of the canned bits they show in current broadcasts 5-10 minutes after the play.
Once that works, how far can we be from compositing these images in real time? That will be amazing.
Thanks for the link. It doesn't surprise me that the NFL has it available, but I'm particularly interested in a non-proprietary (albeit poorer quality) version becoming available through aggregated footage from individual cellphones, rather than state-of-the-art tech.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] thread* what I really mean is that most animated gifs sorta suck in my view; obviously I'm in a minority on this.
There is a video here, demonstrating the technology with baseball: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/aug/13/free...
Once that works, how far can we be from compositing these images in real time? That will be amazing.