“In the past you’ve watched soccer … Now experience it!” Words flash across a computer screen, introducing viewers to the “soccer experience”. Shaky footage shows amateur players passing the ball between themselves. Quick-moving shots capture sky, grass, players and legs — all in head-spinning motion.
“It’s sort of like being on a boat — you could get sick watching it,” laughs Petros Pouroullis, one of the creative minds behind the soccer project, along with fellow University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) fourth-year engineering student Jeff Yueh Lin.
Yueh Lin and Pouroullis propose attaching wireless cameras to soccer players and transmitting the footage to nearby cellphones. This would allow spectators to watch the game from the players’ perspective, Pouroullis says.
Their project is part of Wits’ new Convergence Laboratory, which was launched earlier this month. Convergence represents the coming together of different information and communications technologies, incorporating voice, data, multimedia and entertainment facilities, for example. The laboratory aims to study this quickly developing field and make it more accessible to the public.
The soccer project grew from the idea of developing a mobile application relating to the 2010 Soccer World Cup, to be hosted by South Africa. “We looked at this year’s World Cup in Germany, and the first-person experience of the game wasn’t there,” Yueh Lin told the Mail & Guardian Online.
The creators say they felt that mobile television would probably be big by 2010, and this project would introduce a new viewing dimension that had not been tapped into before.
Their plan is to attach small wireless cameras to the players’ jerseys — near the stomach area for optimal stability. The resulting footage would be channelled to a sort of “video jockey” who would then choose which camera angle to transmit to the cellphones of people in the stands.
The research is still in its initial research stages, but Pouroullis and Yueh Lin have already come up against some obstacles. The size of wireless cameras would have to decrease significantly, which should happen in four years’ time, Pouroullis says. Better integration between the player and the camera, as well as more advanced video-processing methods, is also needed to increase stability and clarity of the footage being transmitted.
The two students say that it was not their initial intention to see the project — conceptualised as a final-year engineering project — put into practice.
“The whole intention was to give them [the students] an interesting project to learn from,” says Barry Dwolatzky, professor of software engineering and head of the Convergence Laboratory.
Housed within the Wits school of electrical and information engineering, students at the Convergence Laboratory will conduct research into areas such as second-, third- and fourth-generation mobile access; telemedicine; mobile e-commerce; broadcasting; and distance learning.
Another student project forming part of the laboratory launch is an aid for visually impaired people that uses a PC and a web camera to stream and manipulate images according to a person’s specific requirements.
There is also the P5 Music Glove project, in which hand gestures and a “data glove” are used to control applications such as music composition and sign-language recognition. Last week, this project won first prize in two national competitions for student engineers.
The laboratory also includes a “client area” where convergence will be demonstrated to students and the public. “Convergence is one of those things that everyone uses but no one knows about … my 12-year-old son on MXit also uses it,” Dwolatzky says. “To explain is to understand.”
Yueh Lin says the laboratory “provides hands-on experience for people to engage with technology … It is an opportunity and a research platform.”
The laboratory is a work in progress. Some of its student projects may be worth exploring and implementing at a later stage, Dwolatzky says, but there is no concrete plan at this point.
So, for a while longer, fans will have to settle for buying front-row tickets to experience the World Cup up close.