VizWorld.com

Baseball fans, especially Yankee fans, will want to head over to The New York Times to check out a fantastic time-lapse created by Robert Caplin using a collection of 12,000 photographs taken before and during the game.

Mr. Caplin, who is just 26, said he wanted the montage to seem as if it had been made a hundred years ago — “You know when you look back at old movie footage and they were cranking it? And it was really jumpy and slightly faster than normal?” The game is played to Chopin’s Waltz No. 5, a score Mr. Caplin chose to complement the antique sensibility of the piece.

Most of the actual game footage is taken with a tilt-shift lens, giving the entire thing a fun look as though you’re watching a model recreation of the event.

I’ve embedded the video after the break for your viewing pleasure.

via Showcase: 12,000-Faceted Diamond – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com.

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Graphics baseball, photography, sports, time lapse, yankees

If you watched the recent Home-Run Derby on ESPN, you might have noticed that the balls were tracked mid-flight with a colored “comet trail”.  Popular Science has an article talked to the german firm “Trackman” who built the technology making it possible.

The Ball Tracker utilizes low-power Doppler radar operating at 2000 Hz to monitor the speed, location and spin of the ball. That data is fed to an algorithm which calculates the projected path of the ball based on its current location. This allows ESPN to continuously display the distance traveled on the screen during flight and to calculate the total home run length as soon as the ball lands (previous methods took seconds or minutes to get the same information).

See a video of the effect after the break.

via How It Works: ESPN’s Ball Tracker Follows Home Runs With Doppler Radar | Popular Science.

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Science baseball, realtime, sports, trackman

The Harris Corporation has worked with the Baltimore Orioles to update their website with a new feature ‘Virtual Birdland’.  They created multiple 3D Flyover videos of the areas around the Camden Yards, allowing anyone with a web browser to ‘virtually’ fly over the park, adjacent parking lots, and Inner Harbor.

“Virtual Birdland provides Orioles fans with a clear view of what they will see prior to arriving at Oriole Park, and helps familiarize them with traffic patterns, ample parking options, and other area attractions surrounding the ballpark,” said Greg Bader, Orioles Director of Communications. “This is especially convenient for first-time visitors who are unfamiliar with the area and want to become more comfortable with where they are going, and how to get there.

This was done with the same technology used to create the Virtual Parade Route a few months back.  Read the full press release after the break.

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Graphics, Science baseball, geospatial, harris, pressrelease, sports