January 29 – Start-up Dutch firm SciSports has raised €1.35 million to develop its BallJames three-dimensional pixel technology that is used to enhance football data analysis.
The technology works by converting a match in real time into three-dimensional pixels that provide new and more accurate data fields. The solution SciSports has come up with draw from the medical field of radiology.
“BallJames is actually an MRI scanner that spans the entire football pitch,” said company founder Giels Brouwer. “In fact, BallJames doesn’t even follow players, but tracks how so-called voxel-clouds move through our virtual stadium. Our Machine Learning algorithms teach the system what the players and the rules of the game are.”
The result is a massive amount of new data and much higher levels of accuracy in that data. Information that can be put to a variety of uses.
“For us, the challenge and ambition was to generate 3D football data of all 22 players and the ball. You can compare our new technology with goal line technology that spans the entire pitch. Just imagine what this will mean in terms of refereeing the game or the potential of all this new data.”
SciSports was closely with the University of Twente and is developing its technology with Dutch clubs PSV, Vitesse and Heracles Almelo.
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