CES: Sony’s Smart Tennis Sensor is Coming

by
January 7, 2015

We’ve known for some time that Sony was releasing a sensor that attaches to tennis rackets, but we were able to learn more about the device at Sony’s CES booth.

The device is fairly straight forward and looks easy to attach. A clip mechanism is attached the butt end of the racket, and the sensor snaps into that clip. Sony representatives were able to confirm that users would be able to buy multiple clips to attach to multiple rackets. That way, a sensor could be easily switched from one racket to the other. The clips are compatible with select Wilson, Head, Prince, and Yonex rackets — all in all, over 100 rackets are compatible according to Sony.

smarttennis3

The sensor tracks a myriad of things like swing type, swing speed and ball spin. It even senses vibrations to locate where on the racket the ball was struck. The data can be streamed directly to a Sony smartwatch or a tablet/smartphone using Bluetooth, or the sensor can store the data locally to be dumped later. According to Sony, when streaming data, the sensor can last about 90 minutes on a charge while it can go three hours while in memory mode.

smarttennis2

Sony says the sensor is set to be released in the U.S. and Canada in the early part of this year for $200.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

David G. Temple is the Managing Editor of TechGraphs and a contributor to FanGraphs, NotGraphs and The Hardball Times. He hosts the award-eligible podcast Stealing Home. Dayn Perry once called him a "Bible Made of Lasers." Follow him on Twitter @davidgtemple.

Comments are closed.