Intel, X Games team up to advance sports technology
This is a month old, but we’re willing to bet that many of our readers out there missed the incredible sports technology update. For last month’s X Games, they teamed up with Intel to place chips on the competitor’s snowboards. To professionals, analysts, and hardcore fans, the tricks and spins are easily identified — but for most of the planet, this new sports technology could change everything. An article written in The Denver Post explains Intel’s “Curie” technology and describes how information and data is shared in real-time. This way, announcers and fans can quickly digest the science behind any move in real-time. We’d try to elaborate, but I think that might be better suited for the experts:
“Able to instantly relay information about height, speed, rotations and the G-forces behind impacts, the new board-mounted Intel microprocessors connect audiences with the sport’s most audacious trickery — like those twirling triple corks — by revealing the statistics behind the tricks. ‘Take a trick like a rodeo. For a lot of viewers who aren’t that familiar with the sport, they may not know what that means,’ said Tyler Fetters, a new concepts engineer for Intel. ‘But with the chip we can provide data that shows it was one flip and a 180-rotation. They start to connect with the terminology as well as with the sport and the athletes at a different level.'”
As a personal fan of winter sports, but of extremely low sport-specific intelligence, this would be a game-changer for me. Instead of guessing whether or not we just saw the best trick of the night, sports technology like this will just simply let us know. Although Intel says this is just the beginning of sports technology enhancements, Mike Jankowski, head coach of the U.S. Freesking and U.S. Snowboarding teams summed it up in one sentence: “[this] can be a game changer for us.”
The Denver Post — Extreme sports science takes big steps during Winter X Games
