If you’ve been reading eightbar for a while, you may know that last year, some of the group put together a nice demo for Wimbledon (video available). The build was a proof-of-concept for taking a live feed of the balls from the Hawkeye system, and replaying the action in-world.
Well, the news is out on the Sydney Morning Herald site today, and Chris Yeoh mentions it too… a group from IBM has put together a really stunning build for the Australian Open. From the SMH article:
Over the duration of the two week tournament, data will be fed from games in the real Rod Laver Arena into the unreal one, nano seconds after happens.
The feed will come from game-tracking technologies such as the line-calling system HawkEye, PointTracker which plots shots and ball trajectories and Speed Serve which clocks the players’ serves.
I took a sneaky early tour of the site. There are some fantastic touches – for example, you can see rallies played out on the court, there are plenty of shops, open areas to chat, and video screens. Well done to the team involved (Pipe Hesse, Gizzy Electricteeth, and all the others) – this is really one of the best builds I’ve seen.
Click through for slightly larger screenshots, and be sure to visit once the site is open to all 🙂