Archive for motion capture

In an effort to keep their pitchers healthy, the Tampa Bay Rays have enlisted the services of markerless motion capture company KinaTrax. As Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports reported Monday, the Rays are the first team to partner with the Philadelphia-based company.

When asked about the technology Tuesday, KinaTrax founder Michael Eckstein was reluctant to reveal much of the technology that drove his company’s system. Images from “multiple cameras” positioned throughout the ballpark (an earlier test used eight) are stitched together to create an unobstructed, 360-degree view of the pitcher. Eckstein compared his system to the commercially-available Microsoft Kinect, which uses infrared and sonar tracking to capture a user’s position for video gaming or other applications.

“The Kinect has a focal length of 8 to 14 feet, and captures 30 frames per second,” Eckstein said. “The challenge is, how do you scale that up to an MLB stadium, where you have to capture 275 to 300 frames per second from 350 feet away?”

Once the data is collected and uploaded to cloud storage, “proprietary algorithms” are then used to identify the position of body landmarks like joints and calculate the distances, angles, velocities, and accelerations between the various body segments. In an earlier talk at the 2013 SABR Conference in Philadelphia, Eckstein claimed that the positions measured by the system were accurate to within 1.5 centimeters.

It is probably no surprise that capturing such detailed visual information hundreds of times per second is a costly process. Eckstein estimates that a typical game could produce up to 1.4 terabytes of data. The data is owned by the teams — since it identifies each pitcher and is thus considered medical information, even KinaTrax can’t access it without permission once it’s collected. For teams unable to work with the raw data, KinaTrax can also develop reports on key metrics; Eckstein said in his 2013 presentation his system was capable of generating these reports overnight.

“Some teams have the ability and the staff to say, ‘We want these kinds of reports, and these kinds of analytics,’ and then we can go out and produce them,” Eckstein said. “And then if teams have very qualified staff, they’ll get the raw data to work with themselves.”

Although KinaTrax worked with the Mets in 2013 to develop their system, Tampa Bay is the first major-league team to install the system and collect game data. And while it’s too early to draw any conclusions from the data collected by the system, Eckstein is happy with KinaTrax’s early performance.

“We’ve successfully recorded thousands of pitches, and the system is working as expected,” he said.

According to Eckstein, KinaTrax had discussed possible arrangements with 17 MLB teams between the Winter Meetings, Cactus League, and Grapefruit League before finally coming to an agreement with the Rays. Eckstein was excited about working with the Rays, praising their front office acumen and even the symmetrical shape of Tropicana Field (which made camera installation easier).

“The Rays are among those top major-league teams that understand what we’re doing and have an understanding of big data,” Eckstein said. “We couldn’t ask for a better team for our pilot.”

Teams have already proposed a number of different uses for the system. For major league pitchers, teams could use the system to demonstrate “best practices,” and highlight the subtle changes in mechanics that could separate a great outing from a poor one. But Eckstein also discussed the possibility of installing the cameras in minor-league parks, allowing teams to better teach proper mechanics to young arms while also developing “longitudinal patient records” of changes to a pitcher’s kinematics over time.

“All of the teams we’re speaking to want them in their major league stadiums,” Eckstein said. “But the really innovative teams tell me, ‘Where we will get the most benefit out of this is with our Single-A or Double-A teams.'”

Once installed, the system can also be adjusted to capture mechanics in bullpen sessions, and could be modified to track hitters’ swing mechanics. For now, though, KinaTrax is primarily focused on the action on the pitcher’s mound.

“There’s a consensus among teams about this anecdotal evidence of pitchers who are great in their bullpens but then lose it on the mound,” Eckstein said. “But truth be told, it’s the in-game information that managers, coaches, and scouts are after.”

Before founding KinaTrax, Eckstein worked in the technology sector for 25 years, helping companies figure out how to use technology to develop competitive advantages. A baseball fan, Eckstein found himself at a lunch with a Phillies senior executive in 2012, and the conversation turned to Roy Halladay’s early-season struggles.

“He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a way to measure his mechanics and see what he’s doing wrong?'” Eckstein said. “And I said, ‘Oh, this will be easy. We’ll go to Microsoft and they’ll come up with something.'”

It wasn’t that easy, of course. The leap from the existing technology to in-game motion capture from hundreds of feet away required the development of an entirely new technology platform, which became the basis for KinaTrax.

Before Monday, KinaTrax first announced itself at the 2013 SABR Conference in Philadelphia, where Eckstein gave a talk and brief demonstration on his system. At the time, KinaTrax had persuaded the Mets to let them test their camera system in Citi Field. The eight-camera test was successful, but no actual game data were recorded.

Now that the word is out on KinaTrax, Eckstein plans to return to the Winter Meetings and put his newly-tested product before the decision-makers in MLB front offices.

“We’re going to have serious discussions with teams about agreements for the 2016 season,” he said.

But go on the company’s website and you’re greeted not by a picture of a Major Leaguer or of Tropicana Field but by a youth baseball pitcher. This is not just a nice image: Eckstein said KinaTrax is planning to scale its system down for college, high school, and even youth-level teams.

“Clearly the arm motion is very different for an eight or 12-year-old versus a major league pitcher,” Eckstein said. “But we feel that with the nuggets we’ve learned, and with cameras that don’t have to capture 275 to 300 frames per second and don’t have to be 350 feet away, we can bring the price of the system down to that level.”

Sports analytics has moved on from the days when an ambitious amateur could fire up Excel or a relational database and make earth-shattering discoveries. Modern front offices must incorporate not only on-field performance but also medical histories, training results, biomechanics data, and a host of other sources into their decision making. To help teams better manage and access that mountain of data, Dublin-based Kitman Labs has developed the Profiler, a system that combines disparate data sources into analytics describing player health and injury risk.

Chief product officer Stephen Smith described Kitman Labs’ offering as “the operating system for sports teams.” The strength of the system is in its ability to combine data from multiple areas — including medical, biomechanical, and on-field sources — to produce more holistic analytics that can better inform team decision making regardingl athlete training and injury prevention. Smith said he was first inspired to create the system while working as an athletic trainer for Leinster, an Irish rugby team.

“One of the biggest challenges I had as a practitioner was that all the fitness data was held in one area, all the medical data was held in one area, and all the performance analytics were held in another area,” Smith said. “That just made it very hard to understand what any of the information actually meant.”

An example of the power of Profiler is demonstrated through a software application that allows users to collect markerless, three-dimensional biomechanical data from an off-the-shelf Microsoft Kinect. The software can calculate select joint angles from an athlete a few feet away — even during rapid dynamic movements, such as running, kicking, or throwing a pitch. And although Smith insisted that the Kinect software was “probably five percent of what we actually do,” he was enthusiastic about its ability to make motion-capture based analysis more accessible.

“Biomechanical information that you would garner in a normal professional sports environment would take you hours to actually get because the downtime is huge, and the cost of that is pretty difficult, and you just can’t access that day to day because it takes too long,” Smith said. “The software that we’ve created jumps professional sports teams into the next generation of real-time technology.”

When interviewed, Smith refused to name the specific organizations that have partnered with his companies.

“We definitely don’t like to speak about our clients because a lot of the information we’re housing, as you can imagine, is very sensitive data on very high-profile athletes,” he said.

But some of his clients have been less tight-lipped about their relationship. In March, The Los Angeles Dodgers announced that they would be partnering with Kitman Labs in their farm system, declaring themselves “the first American sports team” to sign with the company. Across the pond, Kitman Labs works with British Premier League squad Everton, along with a number of Irish rugby teams. Other organizations, including the San Francisco Giants, have also tested this system.

When Kitman Labs signs a new client, the two first collaborate to determine which data and which metrics are most important to the organization, and what sources of information the organization already collects. Kitman’s sports scientists then work with the coaches and training staff to demonstrate how to use the system and understand the analytics the system produces.

“We have a very experienced team of sport scientists who all understand the individual nature of each sporting discipline that we work with, and the uniqueness of each club, team, and athlete,” Smith said. “Those sports scientists will actually be on the ground with teams for a number of days actually helping them to get up to speed.”

Smith says he understands that his company offers an appealing solution to clubs looking to maximize the return on their sizable investments in player salaries, not to mention strength and conditioning, coaching, and other aspects.

“I presume that [general managers] want tools to ensure that they can get the best value from their athletes,” Smith said. “I think the clubs just love the idea of being able to try and maximize on that by being sure they can keep the athletes on the field.”

But the growth of biomechanics data has led to rumblings in some quarters. Some have expressed concerns that medical data which suggests an injury risk could be used against athletes during negotiations. (An example can be seen in the controversy surrounding the Houston Astros’ dealings with top overall pick Brady Aiken last summer.) Despite this, Smith said he hasn’t seen any pushback from athletes on teams using this product, and insists that the system was designed primarily with athlete wellbeing in mind.

“One of the largest driving forces for us in doing this is that we want to protect athlete welfare, we want to improve the standard of care that is given to athletes worldwide,” Smith said. “It’s there purely for the team to use that information to empower their decision making, and that way they can ensure the athlete makes it onto the field in the best possible shape.”

Kitman Labs was born out of Smith’s postgraduate research into injury risk factors, as well as his professional experience as an athletic trainer. The company was founded in October 2012, with its first product offering coming online in June 2013. By early 2014, Kitman Labs had signed their first partnerships with soccer and rugby teams, and were looking to expand into the American market.

“We kind of expected that the market over here would be pretty far ahead of what was going on in Europe,” Smith said. “But when we came over, we realized that it didn’t look like there was anybody else trying to do something like what we were doing.”

The company opened its first American office in Menlo Park, California, in September 2014. Since the MLB season was just wrapping up, Kitman Labs initially focused on expanding into baseball to coincide with teams’ buying cycles. Kitman Labs is now looking to expand into other sports, developing new applications in both professional and collegiate sports leagues.

“We’ve had early success with baseball in the U.S., but we’re actively working with NBA teams, NFL teams, and we’re actually now branching into the NHL as well,” Jeff Eckenhoff, a member of the Business Development team, said. “We’re pretty sport agnostic.”

And with the expansion into new sports comes an expansion of staff, as Kitman Labs looks to add sports scientists and engineers that can help them adapt their solutions for new clients. Smith said his company is actively looking to fill eight vacancies.

“We need industry experts from basketball, football, and baseball to come and be part our team, and to help us solve the largest problems for each of these sports so that we can truly help these teams to uncover the sources of injuries,” Smith said.

Still, Smith insisted that his company’s expansion would not come at the expense of Kitman’s current offerings.

“We don’t want to be a company that walks into a market and grabs a huge collection of customers and then walks away with their checks in our back pocket,” Smith said. “We want to change the face of sports science and sports medicine and we’re going to do that by incredible focus and by being extremely diligent.”

Professional baseball is a grind, with daily games and countless hours of batting practice for hitters. But younger hitters working in a batting cage lack the feedback of seeing how that last hit would have traveled on the diamond. To help hitters get that experience, the company InMotion has developed the HitTrax system, capable of tracking batted ball speed, launch angle, and a number of other parameters that tell hitters how far each ball would have traveled during an actual game.

The system consists of separate hardware and software components. The hardware, encased in the rectangular white box seen above, consists of three near-infrared cameras and two near-infrared LED arrays that better illuminate the ball. Like other motion-capture systems, multiple cameras track the ball as it crosses the camera volume. The location of the ball in each camera’s field of vision, combined with the known distances between each camera, are combined to measure the position of the ball in three dimensions.

The box containing the cameras is positioned inside the cage, a few feet behind the batter and just in front of the plate, in a fixed position for both right- and left-handed batters. You typically wouldn’t want to stand by the box when someone is in the cage, of course, but the hardware is still well-protected from foul balls: the LED arrays are behind bulletproof glass, and the front of the box is “made from the same material as hockey boards,” according to Tom Stepsis, InMotion Systems’s director of marketing.

The tracking data is then fed into a physics engine to project the distance each hit would travel in the real world. But in addition to distance and trajectory, HitTrax also estimates whether each batted ball would result in a hit or an out. The fielders’ ability has been programmed to match the hitter’s, so high school hitters will face high school fielders, whereas more skilled fielders and deeper fences await older hitters.

InMotion, based in Northborough, Mass., claims that the speeds reported by the HitTrax system are accurate to within one mile per hour, as compared with conventional radar guns. Stepsis also claimed the distances reported were accurate to within five percent of the actual distance, as measured manually with a tape measure. The system does not track the ball’s spin (which has been shown to have an important impact on the distance a fly ball travels) but instead makes its calculation based on the first few feet of trajectory captured by the cameras.

The HitTrax software is controlled by a touchscreen, where the user can enter personal information, change settings, or switch between training and game mode. In training mode, the system can produce detailed spray charts, strike zone “hot and cold” zones, and trajectory data such as launch angle and exit velocity. Reports and leaderboards are available online so players can track their performance and get a sense of how a change to their swing mechanics might translate to in-game performance.

But game mode, Stepsis said, was entirely separate. Here, hitters can compete in home run derbies and on teams in simulated games. The system also includes fun features, like power boosts, to affect trajectories.

Despite its name, the HitTrax system is also capable of tracking pitchers. The system tracks the horizontal and vertical break of the ball, the “end speed” as the pitch crosses the plate, and where in the strike zone the pitch was located. Because the cameras are fixed in front of home plate, however, more in-depth statistics like release point, starting speed, and a more detailed trajectory of the ball’s path to home plate, are not available.

Prior to founding InMotion, the company’s founders had decades of experience with motion tracking technologies and a passion for baseball. It took InMotion “a solid two years” to develop the HitTrax system to the point where it was ready to be sold. Stepsis said that, because the product was so unlike other available offerings, the initial marketing focused on showing potential customers how to use the system.

“When we introduced this, part of the hurdle was explaining what it was to people,” Stepsis said. “And seeing is believing, so we did a lot of demos. And then once people saw it, word of mouth started to spread, and things really took off.”

The system is now in facilities across North America, along with some high schools, colleges, and the occasional private residence. For those in publicly-accessible facilities, the price for a session can vary widely.

“There are some places that charge over $100, there are some places that just put this in a coin-op [batting cage] and just charge double, so instead of $1 for 20 balls, it’s $2,” Stepsis said.

InMotion has gotten positive feedback from players, coaches, and facility owners as a training tool, but Stepsis said some users were also using it for tryouts or scouting purposes.

“Some of our customers who own facilities are also MLB scouts, and they love it,” Stepsis said. “They feel like the data we’re providing them just paints this elaborate picture of what the player’s like.”

As InMotion grows and HitTrax becomes more popular, Stepsis hopes that his company will be able to give players and coaches instant access to the type of data that will allow them to monitor their progress and quantify the effect of any changes in their swings.

“We’re not coaches. We just want to be data providers,” Stepsis said. “It’s all about making the indoor training environment more engaging and more beneficial.”