Hawk-Eye
Encyclopedia : H : HA : HAW : Hawk-Eye
- For other meanings, see Hawkeye.
Hawk-Eye is a computer system used in cricket, tennis and other sports to track the path of the ball. It was developed in 2001 by Dr. Paul Hawkins whilst working at Roke Manor Research Limited before being spun out into a new company Hawk-Eye Innovations Ltd as a joint venture with Sunset + Vine, the television production company.
The system was first used during a Test match between Pakistan and England at Lord's cricket ground on 21st April 2001 by Channel 4. Since then it has been an indispensable tool for commentators. However, the system is not used by the umpires to judiciate on LBW decisions in Test cricket or one-day international cricket. It is now used by most television coverage networks to track the trajectory of balls in flight.
Hawk-Eye uses six or more television cameras situated around the ground, linked to a computer system. The computer reads in the video in real time, and tracks the path of the ball on each camera. These six separate views are then combined together to produce an accurate 3D representation of the path of the ball, which can be viewed in a virtual reality simulation.
Its major use in cricket is in analysing leg before wicket decisions, where Hawk-Eye can project the likely path of the ball forward, through the batsman's legs, to see if it would have hit the wicket. Currently this information is only visible to television viewers, although it may be adopted in the future by the third umpire, who currently sees only conventional slow motion replays.
Hawk-Eye has also been used in television coverage of several major tennis tournaments, including Wimbledon, the Stella Artois at Queens, the Davis Cup and the Tennis Masters Cup. It is also used as part of a larger tennis simulation implemented by IBM called Point Tracker. Along with Cyclops and Auto-Ref, it is one of several automated line-calling mechanisms used.
The 2006 Hopman Cup in Perth, Western Australia, was the first elite-level tennis tournament where players were allowed to challenge point-ending line calls, which were then reviewed by the referees using Hawk-Eye technology. It used 10 cameras feeding information about ball position to the computers.
In March 2006 at the Nasdaq-100 Open Hawk-Eye was used officially for the first time at a tennis tour event.
On June 14, 2006, it was announced that the Wisden group had bought Hawk-Eye [link]. It was announced that this acquisition will not only strengthen Wisden's presence in cricket but also allow it to enter tennis and other international sports. Hawk-Eye is already working on implementing the system for basketball.
According to Hawk-Eye's website, the data produced by Hawk-Eye is much more than what is shown on television. This data can easily be shown on Internet. Wisden also owns the cricket website Cricinfo therefore it can be speculated that Wisden can incorporate data generated by Hawk-Eye to augment the online coverage of cricket by cricinfo.
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