One one side of the sphere was a team of former pro soccer players. At the other, a squad of visually impaired amateurs. Both sides laced ‘em up, stretched out their quads and went face to face in a scrimmage, though the matchup was much more even than you may expect. It is all element of something called the “Sound of Football” — the most recent experiment from the Pepsi Refresh Project. The basis was to level the playing field, to be able to speak, by forcing both teams to play a match using only their ears, and a gorgeous nifty tracking system. Created by Tracab, this method was constructed from 16 cameras covering the whole pitch (including two stereovision cameras placed at mid-field), and used jersey colors to differentiate the house team from the away team, and to spot the referees. This arrange, which was deployed over the past World Cup, essentially tracked the location of every player in real-time. This data was then funneled into an iPhone attached to every player’s headset, and converted right into a surround-sound landscape, using an app created by a corporation called Society 46. Unique sounds were assigned to both the ball and the goal; turning your head towards one goal would produce one sound, facing the ball would bring about another. This allowed each player to get a higher idea of his surroundings and of his spatial positioning, though, as some of the pros found, it wasn’t quite as easy because it looked. The designers of this methodology at the moment are trying to use their technology in other, non-sports arenas, within the hopes of helping the blind and visually impaired “see” more of the sector around them. Check up on a couple of videos at the match and the technology behind it, after the break.
[Thanks, Martin]
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