Animation Research Ltd

Tuesday May 19, 2009

With racing becoming ever more competitive and complex you often need a keen eye to identify the winner. Luckily there is now virtual filming technology that will do the work for us.

With racing becoming ever more competitive and complex you often need a keen eye to identify the winner. Luckily there is now virtual filming technology that will do the work for us.

Take design, the very element that characterises the America’s Cup, out of the equation and you get some unbelievably close racing. That was one of the lessons learnt from the recent Louis Vuitton Pacific Series in Auckland. At times the racing was so close the human eye struggled to identify a winner. Rarely has any form of yachting so closely matched that of horse racing where a photo finish is a familiar way to settle the score.

One of the best examples was a match between China Team and Luna Rossa where the lead boat, Luna Rossa, had to put in a penalty turn on the finish line as their opposition thundered down behind. As the two bows crossed the line there was silence in the commentary boxes, no one wanting to commit to making that crucial call. And we were still unsure some seconds after the boats had finished. In fact, the only person who was certain of the result was race officer Peter Reggio, whose beady eye was on the finish line to make the call.

For the rest of us, it was a virtual eye that we had to turn to to confirm the news of the day. Being able to re-run the computer animations frame by frame as the pair crossed the line substantiated Reggio’s call, heightening the drama of the situation even further.

The use of Virtual Eye (often confused with the earlier system Virtual Spectator) has become commonplace within America’s Cup-style racing to such a degree that most who see it take it for granted. But behind the scenes the development of the technology has been substantial. For Animation Research, the Kiwi company responsible for the technology, the software has come a long way since the first computer rendered images of Cup boats faithfully mimicked every twitch aboard the real things out at sea.

“One of the biggest changes has been shrinking the data into a box that was big enough for a family picnic into one that is too small for one round of sandwiches,” says Animation Research’s Ian Taylor. “The hardest bit of the development is getting the GPS data back to shore reliably. Another issue is accuracy, it’s one thing to achieve sub-2m accuracy, but how often can this be achieved? When you look at some data trails, it’s not uncommon to find gaps in the data.”

Clearly, the ability to recreate photo finishes or frame by frame replays of critical incidents requires absolute reliability. But, as the Virtual Eye coverage of the LV Pacific Series demonstrated, the system offers more than just a detailed analysis of each boat’s movements. Using the system as an alternative to live TV broadcast is another area that’s ripe for development.

Where once the animations were used sparingly to supplement a multi-camera broadcast by highlighting a particular incident or lead distance, now the system is so realistic that it can be used as a complete stream in its own right. Throughout the Pacific Series the daily live television broadcast featured Virtual Eye as the main feed, supplemented by live video footage shot from the hilltop vantage point of North Head with constant live commentary from two teams, one afloat and one ashore in the studio. The result was impressive. With one camera, one animation system and a team of live commentators, suddenly the action was available ashore, online, on the airwaves and on TV.

Could this be the future for other events? From motor rallies to powerboat racing and even golf, virtual coverage has helped both to explain and to quantify the action. And when it comes to sailing there are events that might benefit, from the TP52 season to Olympic sailing, the technology is now clearly there to tell the real story.

Article by Matthew Sheahan, www.yachtingworld.com © April 2009