Hasta La Gadget!

This week, the Seattle Mariners showed off a new 3,840 x 1,080, surface-mount LED display at Safeco Field — one the team’s PR department touts as the “largest in Major League Baseball and among the largest in all of sports.” At 201.5 feet wide by 56.7 feet tall, its surface area of 11,425 square feet places it behind massive screens at Charlotte Motor Speedway (16,000 square feet) and Cowboys Stadium (11,520 square feet). That’s good enough, the team said, to rank as the third-largest sports-venue display in North America and surpasses Kauffman Stadium’s HD scoreboard as the largest in baseball. Roughly 1,200 individual panels make up the screen, offering a total of 4,147,200 pixels — more pixels than the 2.6-megapixel Cowboys Stadium display, the team pointed out.

To feed their new HD beast, the team revamped its video control room and upgraded to high-def cameras throughout the stadium. A 64-bit operating system called VisionSOFT allows the team to mix in multiple video sources, from in-house animations and HD video feeds to out-of-town footage from broadcast partners. All told, the HD upgrade required about 3,000 each feet of power, video coax and Cat5 cables. Along with showing ads, stats and replays, the team will take advantage of the HD resolution to display social media updates from fans during games via Twitter, Google+ and other sources.

You can check out more shots of the new screen in action after the break.

Filed under: Displays, HD

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The 2014 World Cup will take place in Brazil, and folks are already beginning to prepare for the tournament. As qualifying goes on as we speak, organizers are working on a new system that will electronically detect when a goal has been scored, and it was just announced today that GoalControl will be providing the technology necessary.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve discussed goal-line technology for the 2014 World Cup. FIFA initially announced it back in February. However, more details were released today on how exactly it all will work. Overall, the stadium has 14 cameras spread out amongst it, with 7 cameras focusing on each of the two goals in order to detect when a goal is scored.

All objects that are within the cameras’ field of view are tracked, but the players and referees are cleverly filtered out, leaving just the ball being tracked. The ball’s position is continuously and automatically captured in three dimensions (X-, Y- and Z-coordinates) whenever it gets close to the goal, in order to accurately judge where the ball is.

If the ball crosses the goal line, the system sends an encrypted signal to a watch that referees will be wearing. The signal is sent in less than a second after the ball has passed the goal line. Plus, a virtual 3D image of any portions of the playing field can be shown on the big screen from any camera angle, thanks to those 14 strategically-placed cameras. It also doesn’t hurt to know that the 2014 World Cup will be broadcasted in 4K.

[via BBC News]

Image via Flickr

GoalControl to provide goal-line tech during 2014 World Cup is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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It’s Opening Day! America’s most popular boring sport is back. Great(?). If you have even a passing interest in baseball, you’ve probably ditched work to go catch a game already, but if not, here’s a bit of fun. A GoPro on a baseball. Yep, as silly and wonderful as it sounds.

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U-verse subscribers often have some bandwidth to spare; it’s only fair that they make the most of it with some streaming sports. Appropriately, AT&T and ESPN have just flicked the switch on WatchESPN support for those who subscribe to U-verse TV service. As always, viewers can tune into live and on-demand content from a computer, an Xbox 360 (with an Xbox Live Gold subscription) or their Android and iOS devices while on the road. The sports partnership is also just the start: AT&T notes that all flavors of Watch Disney should be coming “soon,” giving the little ones something to stream in between football matches.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, AT&T

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Source: WatchESPN

Motion sensor-based golf devices are all the rage these days, but they mostly target the full swing. Can such electronics be accurate enough to measure a much smaller stroke, namely the all-important putt? Since golf season’s nearly here, we decided to find out with the $200 3BaysGSA Putt, a tiny, lightweight device that fits in the handle of a putter and relays stroke information via Bluetooth to an Android or iOS device. As Engadget’s resident golf nut, yours truly put the device through its paces both objectively and in a less-than-formal way to see whether it could accurately track a stroke. Will it help you lift your putter in victory, or make you wrap it around a tree? Hit the break to see how we did.

Filed under: Misc, Wireless

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