Beginning with this yr’s soccer season, the NFL will use Sony’s Hawk-Eye cameras to measure the line to gain — a course of the chain crew has carried out manually for many years. The 8K cameras will use digital measurement expertise to shortly and precisely decide whether or not the ball traveled 10 yards for a primary down.
The Hawk-Eye system is made up of six 8K cameras that use optical monitoring to find out the ball’s place. When officers obtain a measurement, the system will create a digital recreation of the measurement that the NFL will present contained in the stadium and on TV.
The NFL says Sony’s expertise will provide a extra “environment friendly” various to utilizing sticks and a 10-yard chain to trace the ball’s place. Measuring the ball with Sony’s Hawk-Eye system takes round 30 seconds, which the NFL says is 40 seconds lower than the chain crew takes.
However this doesn’t spell the tip of the chain crew, because the NFL says they’ll nonetheless “stay on the sphere in a secondary capability.”
The NFL started testing Sony’s Hawk-Eye expertise final yr. It is going to be deployed in all 30 US NFL stadiums and worldwide venues. Sony already works with the NFL to energy Synchronized Multi-Angle Replay Know-how (SMART), a system that mixes as much as 4 dwell video feeds directly to assist officers decide the end result of a play.