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| Goal? Taking tech to the world’s most popular sport |
May 8, 2006 |
By Ian Harvey
It was July 30, 1966, the World Cup final at Wembley Stadium in London and 10 minutes into extra time. England’s Geoff Hurst powered a shot against the underside of the West German’s crossbar. It bounced down and out. The crowd of 100,000 held their breath—as did my 10-year-old self listening to the radio broadcast in a southern England cow pasture with my Cub Scout pack.
Swiss referee Gottfried Dienst consulted with his Russian linesman and declared—a gooooooooooooal! England went on to win 4-2 with Hurst scoring yet again, but the screaming never stopped over that third goal, the turning point of the game.
Did it cross the line or didn’t it? We’ll never know, but as the 2006 World Cup finals kick off June 9 in Germany and 32 teams vie for the globe’s most coveted sports championship, you can almost guarantee there will be another disputed call over an offside or, worse, whether a ball fully crosses the goal line.
But this could be the last World Cup played without a technology “assist” —because what the legendary Pele once described as the “beautiful, simple game” isn’t so simple anymore.
Enter the smartball. Masquerading as a simple soccer ball, the device incorporates a 15mm Radio Frequency Identification ( RFID) tag transmitting a 2.4Ghz signal to 12 antennae placed around the field. Together they track when the ball fully crosses between two points, like the goalposts, and determine whether a goal has indeed been scored.
Multiple readers—or interrogators—simultaneously track the ball within a range of 300 metres and the system knows exactly where it is at all times.
On hold, for now
While the implementation of this technology has been delayed after the governing Federation Internationale de Football Associations (FIFA) decided late last year it needs more testing, it’s an innovation being closely watched by all professional sports. The trials landed good results during the under-17 world championship in Peru last fall, and it looks set to debut at club level soon.
Already there is discussion about placing unique identifier transponders on players’ shin pads to help officials determine another tricky rule—the offside, the most blatantly miscalled infraction.
And then, with the ball and 22 players tagged and their movements tracked 2,000 times per second, it’s a small leap to start calling not just offsides but statistics such as speed of the ball, acceleration, distance travelled and reaction times. That data could, for example, quantify a keeper’s great save or underscore a striker’s phenomenal goal. Coaches could even tell which of their players were dogging it on the pitch and which were really putting out the mythical 110 per cent.
Ticket and fan IDs
Meanwhile, lots of cool tech is happening off the field at this year’s World Cup. The most significant is the deployment of RFID on the 2.9 million game tickets in 12 cities. The tickets will be imprinted with MIFARE technology from electronics giant Philips. MIFARE is a contactless smart card standard, which creates an electronic admission control system in which fans wave their tickets over a scanner to confirm authenticity, relaying data wirelessly in real time from access points to a central management control centre.
Those spectators, incidentally, may also be subject to a barrage of digital video surveillance and face-recognition software searching for known hooligans in the crowd—though the reliability of such systems is still up for debate among security experts.
Data load
To carry all that data, Avaya Canada is providing components for a wireless Local Area Network (WiLAN) to empower the 40,000 volunteers, 10,000 media types and the estimated 200,000 security checks. All of this will create about 20 terabytes of network traffic during the 30-day event.
“We figure there will be 100,000 Vo IP calls a day,” said Tracy Fleming, IP telephony practice leader at Avaya in Markham, Ont.
Some 20 HDTV cameras in each stadium will connect via fibre links backed up by fast satellite connections. Some 3.5 billion people will watch the final, but they’ll do it the traditional way, since the much ballyhooed Mobile TV technology, which beams TV to mobile phones, isn’t capable of handling the demand the world’s most watched sport will place on the system.
And still photographers will benefit at the stadiums, with both Wi-Fi links and Ethernet ports on the sidelines to allow them to transmit digital images on the fly to meet deadlines.
Along with all the actual technical challenges comes security concerns, Fleming said. Because it is a global event, FIFA’s network is a prime target not just for hackers but for competing nations which may just try to eavesdrop on the opposition to get a leg up.
Of most concern is a denial-of-service attack, a ploy in which a network service is blocked by overloading servers with unnecessary or malevolent messages.
To counter this, Fleming said security encryption has been “baked in” to the system and will isolate and protect any component under attack.
Web soccer
Can’t get to a screen?
Follow the games live:
www.soccer365.com
www.soccernet.com
www.fifa.com
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