Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium

4:15PM, Wednesday, October 25, 2000
NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03

Visualization Aids for Televised Sports

Stan Honey
CTO, Sportsvision
About the talk:

The recent availability of inexpensive and powerful graphic processing has (just barely) made it economically feasible to do real-time graphic enhancements of live broadcast sporting events. In these systems, graphic elements are inserted into the live broadcast, registered to the real world, and used to illustrate aspects of the sporting event that viewers could not otherwise see.

In this talk Stan Honey will describe the FoxTrax system for tracking and highlighting the puck in NHL hockey games, and the 1st and Ten system that creates the electronic first down line in NFL and NCAA football games. Mr. Honey will describe the history behind these developments, the economics of their development and use, and give a technical description of the equipment and software involved.

Additionally Mr. Honey will describe a new system under development at SportVision which will track and highlight race cars in NASCAR events to be broadcast next season.

About the speaker:

Prior to co-founding SportVision, Mr. Honey was Executive VP of Technology for News Corporation, where he led the development of the FoxTrax hockey puck, set-top boxes for digital satellite TV, encryption systems, and electronic program guides. He also served as President and CEO of Etak Inc., a vehicle navigation and digital mapping company that he founded in 1983 and sold to News Corporation in 1989.

From 1978 to 1983, Mr. Honey was a research engineer at SRI International, specializing in radio-location, signal processing, and Over-the-Horizon radar. He has four patents in vehicle navigation and five patents for broadcast effects technology.

As navigator in offshore ocean races, Mr. Honey has set the passage records for the single-handed, double-handed, and fully-crewed transpacific yacht races and set the record for the maximum distance sailed in 24 hours.

Contact information:

Stan Honey
Chief Technology Officer
SportVision
1240 L'Avenida Avenue Suite C
Mountain View, CA 94043
(650) 961-7825/voice
(650) 961-0102/fax

stanhoney@sportvision.com
http://www.sportvision.com