Archive for Wearable

Shares of GoPro sank 12 percent Tuesday following news that the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple a patent for a remote-controlled, mountable camera, Bloomberg reported. The stock closed Tuesday at $49.87, and while it rebounded slightly Wednesday ($52.34 at closing), it wasn’t enough to quell investor concerns that GoPro could face its stiffest competition yet.

“Investors are concerned that the patent will let Apple, the world’s largest company by market valuation, make products that are similar to what GoPro offers,” said Charlie Anderson, an investment bank and brokerage analyst at Dougherty & Co., to Bloomberg’s Peter Burrows.

Patently Apple monitors Apple’s patent filings and acknowledges that many patents don’t amount to an actual product on the market. However, they found an interesting nugget that makes this seem Apple has a real investment in entering the sports camera market.

What’s interesting here is that Apple’s invention that was filed in 2012 appears to now incorporate intellectual property from Kodak that they acquired back in November 2013. In one implementation, Apple’s invention could directly move into GoPro’s territory as the patent specifically mentions the weaknesses of the GoPro devices.

If Apple acquired a specific Kodak patent to bolster their granted invention, it would appear to be one Apple is taking very seriously. Why else purchase a patent if you’re going to just shelf the idea[?] Exactly which part of the technology Apple is interested in […] isn’t known at this time.

And really, this patent may not be for sports cameras. Maybe it’s related to the iWatch. Or some other Apple product we have no idea about.

Alex Gauna, an analyst for JMP Securities, isn’t concerned by the patent.

“It does not seem to me that launching an action camera accessory is the most logical product extension for Apple to pursue right now,” Gauna told Reuters.

However, details within the patent, such as the following, lend to the idea that Apple has the power to put a dent in the sports camera market if it wants to. And that’s enough to spook investors.

In some embodiments, the microphone is capable of recording sounds in air and also in an underwater environment when the digital camera is used to record underwater images. In other embodiments, the digital camera includes both a conventional air microphone as well as an underwater microphone (hydrophone) capable of recording underwater sounds.

Apple notes in the patent that the camera could be secured to an object, like handle bars, a helmet or a surfboard. Additionally, the system lets users control the camera remotely, which GoPro offers through an app.

Let’s not kid ourselves, GoPro is a beast. Anderson said that the company earned $1 billion in revenue last year. Along with the lion’s share of the sports camera market, GoPro has the buzz and brand name awareness that most companies envy.

But this is Apple we’re talking about. Describing the company’s faithful as a powerful consumer base is like saying Michael Jordan was pretty good at basketball. And with its history of designing stylish products, sports camera shoppers could very well be swayed by a brand name that squashes GoPro and buy a more creative, cooler-looking camera.

(Image via Andreas Kambanis)

Even before covering CES, it was clear that we as a technology-obsessed culture was headed towards a wearable boon. Between proprietary and universal smartwatches to fitness bands and sleep trackers, the new field of connected devices is a field primed for growth. Like any product, these beginning stages offer a wide variety of options without any clear winner sitting above the competition. Before unloading hundreds of dollars on a piece of technology, why not try it out first? At Lumoid, trying before buying is their sole function.

Though Lumoid has offered photography and video trials before, they have recently expanded their scope to include wearables of all kinds. The company will allow you to try any five connected devices for a week. If you happen to find the perfect wearable you’re able to purchase it at retail price, or failing that, it is just $20 to send all five back. The return label is included with the devices and the $20 is automatically taken off of your credit card upon shipping the unwanted wearables back. Sporting choices such as Samsung’s Gear Fit, the Pebble smartwatch and the Fitbit Charge as well as many others for a total of 36 different options, Lumoid is hitting the ground running with this ambitious product trial.

A recent study conducted by Global Web Index from Q3 2014 showed that while 80% of the 170,000 adults use a smartphone, only a combined 16% utilize some sort of smartwatch (9%) or wristband (7%).

If market saturation is the issue — and that is a worthy argument despite the still new wearable field — then perhaps Lumoid will allow users to shed some light on the different products through the week long trials.

The term “knowledge is power” is as important in today’s world of sports as it was when first written down in the Leviathan. Tracking devices are already widely used by professional teams, however never before has a GPS device been open to the public like GameTraka. With the new GameTraka GPS device and accompanying software, any person can arm themselves with a wide assortment of useful on-field analytics. The Australian-made device measures the basics such as distance ran and top speed, as well as giving an intensity rating and acceleration.

The device itself is very small, about the size of a box of matches and measures your position five times per second.

Specifically, the dimensions of the GPS unit is 62mm x 38mm x 8mm and comes in at 22 grams. Given the nature of many sports, collisions are inevitable and rather than have wear a device on the hip or wrist, GameTraka is held in place by a lightweight vest with the sensor placed in the back. The vest easily fits under any jersey or uniform and is specifically designed to fit the unit safely and comfortably.

The company’s mantra is “wearable, shareable and comparable” and as great as the vest and sensor system is, where GameTraka truly shines is the sharing and comparing department. After the game, the sensor sends the data to the software side of things for the full breakdown. Connecting via Bluetooth to an iOS device or computer, the GameTraka software is where the leg work is done. The previously mentioned intensity rating is an estimation of how hard the wearer worked. For example, on a soccer field, a striker may have ran only two-thirds the distance of a midfielder, but at a higher intensity.

By comparing players to each other as well as well from one game to the next, a coach can clearly see who is running the farthest, the fastest and the hardest. From a training perspective, the system removes any subjectivity and guesswork by allowing coaches to see just how well a player is progressing if coming back from an injury. Individual players can compare data by chronological order and take note of any trends that may present themselves.

The price of knowledge from the GameTraka is $299.99 per unit, though according to the official site there are group discounts available. From a basketball coach seeing who truly hustles on defense to a soccer manager attempting to find the fastest in-game striker or winger to a rec league player who just wants to quantify as much about themselves as possible, GameTraka is the ideal unit for gathering on-field information.

Football coaches at every level have long relied on game film to judge their teams’ performance. But this year, NFL teams have partnered with Zebra Technologies to more accurately track their players’ position and speed on the field.

The real-time location solution (RLTS) used by the NFL relies on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags worn by the players in their shoulder pads. Each RFID tag broadcasts its location 25 times per second to the approximately 20 receivers located around the stadium. From this single sensor, the MotionWorks server can determine a player’s location on the field and speed. By adding a second sensor, Zebra can also track a player’s direction and orientation. The sensors, placed on the player’s shoulder pads, are less than an inch in diameter, and include a battery designed to last an entire season. This improves the usability and scalability of the solution, since teams won’t need to spend time and energy removing, charging, and reinstalling the sensors.

The result is a system that can track all 22 players on a field with an accuracy of a few inches, according to Zebra’s data sheet. According to general manager for sports applications Eric Petrosinelli, this gives Zebra’s solution a clear advantage over other solutions based on technology like global positioning systems (GPS).

“Other solutions aren’t providing anywhere near the accuracy or operational simplicity of our solution,” Petrosinelli said. “They don’t really have scalable solutions.”

The NFL would seem to agree: Zebra won what Petrosinelli called a “bake-off” in 2013 among a number of vendors selling competing systems. Their reward was a multi-year contract with the NFL. As training camp was getting underway, the NFL announced that Zebra receivers would be placed in 17 NFL stadiums (specifically, Atlanta, Baltimore, Carolina, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Green Bay, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, New England, New Orleans, Oakland, San Francisco, St. Louis and Washington) and added RFID tags to every player’s pads. Receivers will be installed in the remaining stadiums, as well as “one-off” stadiums like London’s Wembley Stadium and Pro Bowl site Aloha Stadium, during the offseason.

The data generated by the system is currently controlled by the league to prevent the handful of teams with the solution in place from gaining an unfair advantage from the data. A few teams — the 49ers, Lions, and Saints — will also have Zebra solutions installed at their practice facilities. But for now, teams and fans will have to be content with the samples like these that have been shown in the Thursday night games.

Although the MotionWorks solution may be new to the sports world, Zebra has developed and used similar RFID-based solutions for years in the manufacturing industry. But Petrosinelli said the technology adapted surprisingly well to the new application.

“One thing we’ve been pleasantly surprised by is the operational ease in deploying and operating the solution,” Petrosinelli said.

Zebra’s future plans include expanding vertically to other levels of football, as well as horizontally to other sports. Petrosinelli said his company was in talks with a number of organizations (though he couldn’t give their names) to apply Zebra’s technology to their fields.

“We’ve spoken to people both domestically and globally,” he said. “When you win a contract like [the NFL’s], a lot of people take notice of that.”

And while Petrosinelli said Zebra was considering partnering with other companies to incorporate data from sensors like accelerometers or heart rate monitors, the company currently has no plans to design such sensors internally.

“We’re not a consumer wearables company,” Petrosinelli said. “The way our system is designed, we could be a transporter of that information, but we’re not going to be in that business.”

Word is the Google Cardboard toy — which started as a gimmick, is now a toy, and will soon be a tool, I suspect — now has over 500,000 users.

This got me thinking: We already have mini-cameras we can embed in the ground; we have 360° camera technology; and now we have cheap, accessible virtual reality (VR).

Isn’t it time for 360° MLB.tv? Perhaps a camera embedded neatly in front of home plate or the pitcher’s mound. Maybe on the back of the mound to watch closeup up as the shortstop flips a double-play ball to the second baseman.

Or what about mounting a 3D camera on the cable-tugged NFL sky view cameras? Allow fans to watch the play unfold while focusing on just their fantasy wide receiver, finally giving them the vindication to scream at the quarterback, “He’s wide open! Throw it to James Jones already!”

And doesn’t NASCAR already have cameras mounted on every vehicle? Would it be any more difficult to swap in a 360 model?

The technology is probably not a point just yet where a 360 camera can be safely embedded into a soccer pitch or — certainly not — a basketball court or hockey rink. But goal post cross bars, tops of basketball backboards and jumbotrons dangling from stadium roofs could all be reasonable and fun locations for VR watchers.

Think about it, sports execs. Because it would be awesome.

There’s a scene in Iron Man 2 where Tony Stark is struggling to create a new element for his chest piece. He ends up watching an old promotional film his father created, which includes an Easter egg at the end specifically for Tony. In that speech, he uses the phrase “I’m limited by the technology of my time.” It’s a plot point, but it’s also a phrase I think of often. So much of what we see in the tech world, and what we cover at TechGraphs, is straddling the bleeding edge — using everything currently available to us to create the best and most innovative products. But there’s a limit. Moore’s law aside, there are only so many advancements that can happen given the current hardware availability. Every so often, there needs to be a jump. And if what the Bluetooth Special Interest Group says holds true, we may be on the brink of one of those jumps.

The Bluetooth SIG recently announced the coming of Bluetooth 4.2. You can read about all the upcoming changes for yourself, but the big enhancement centers around something called low-power IP connectivity. This essentially gives new Bluetooth devices the ability to connect directly to the Internet — no intermediary required. The ramifications of this has underpinnings in everything from automobiles to lightbulbs, but one of the biggest benefactors could be the wearable tech industry.

With direct Internet connectivity, Bluetooth devices will no longer need to paired to some intermediary device (e.g. a smartphone, tablet, or laptop) to upload and download what it needs to function. It will still need a connection to the Internet via some sort of gateway device, so it’s not as if our future smart watches will be totally free, but it still loosens the restrictions on what a device needs to operate.

Many current offerings of helmet sensors, for instance, use Bluetooth connectivity to relay data back to some central hub. Again, this would be a smartphone or laptop. That laptop then takes that data and uploads it to some server somewhere. This all works fine. Unless the laptop crashes. Or there is interference with the Bluetooth signal. Or the devices roam out of the field of connectivity. Most devices plan for this, certainly, by including some sort of on-board storage that would hold the data until the connection is restored. But if the helmets were able (through an in-stadium device) to upload the data right away, without the need for an extra connection, data could end up being more reliable and devices — not needing the extra storage — could get even smaller. There’s also an increased ability for these devices to talk to each other, be they in-equipment sensors on a hockey team or multiple sensors on one athlete.

This is a little bit of speculation, of course. We will have to wait until the protocol is widely adopted before knowing what kind of advancements can be made. And I’m sure there are things that you or I haven’t even thought about that will make their way to market or to the research sector. And that’s kind of the fun part. While it won’t bring about the Stark vision of a clean, endless source of energy, some pretty interesting things can come about when we are no longer limited by the technology of our times.

(Image via Manuel Iglesias)