Kris Kitani

With the dozens of camera angles used to show a football game on TV, why hasn't anyone ever thought of giving us a ball's-eye view? Because with the spheroid spiraling at speeds up to 600 rpm, a football-cam would produce unwatchable, nauseating footage.

But what if it didn't? Imagine the footage a football would capture if it flew down the gridiron without spinning. That's what researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo have developed, using an algorithm that analyzes frames shot by a football's built-in camera as it spirals across the field. By looking for shots of the sky, the algorithm selects and deletes all frames captured while the camera faces skyward. It then stiches together the downward shots into a panorama. The resulting video (below) is still a little twitchy, but researchers think they'll soon be able to produce instant videos with smooth, wide shots of the football field streaking by below.

Project leader Kris Kitani told PM that the algorithm was the easy part. "There's already been a lot of work on image stitching and making panoramas from multiple small images," he says, "so I just used all of that well known technology." He spent much more time prototyping the camera, which began as a spongy volleyball with a USB camera in it that Kitani rolled down a track. Eventually it became a Nerf ball with a GoPro inside. Next, Kitani hopes to see what he can do with multiple cameras inside a single ball.

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Kitani was surprised to find inspiration in a 1938 Popular Mechanics article featuring a 16-millimeter film camera mounted within a balsa wood football. "When we initially started the work I did what every researcher does," Kitani says. "I went and Googled 'ball and camera' and saw what came out. When I saw the Popular Mechanics article, I was like, woah, someone already did this!" (You're welcome, Kris, though I doubt the video quality of our 1938 effort matches yours.)

Kitani says project is just one of a growing number of endeavors in the field of digital sports. "Digital sports is an area of research concerned with how technology can be combined with sports to do different things… like augment spectator experience, analyze the activities of athletes, and even create entirely new games and sports that weren't possible before." Expanding your field of vision isn't the only way to change sport spectatorship. Kitani also wants to develop a sensor to detect a football's moment of impact, which could send a signal to your cell phone to make it vibrate. "Kind of like the vibrating chairs at Universal Studios."

You can see the BallCam in action below, but heads up: The video shows both the finished product and the spinning raw footage, so it might cause dizziness.

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