Before you take yet another mulligan, consider that the tool to improving your golf game might not be found in your bag of clubs. The makers of an app that employs artificial intelligence and 3D motion analysis say they’ve created a revolutionary way to improve your golf swing through a video shot on your phone. Sportsbox AI is a startup that launched in 2021 out of AI Thinktank, a Bellevue, Wash.-based incubator for AI ideas founded by tech veterans Mike Kennewick and Rich Kennewick. They’re the brothers who founded Voicebox Technologies, an early leader in speech recognition and natural language tech that sold… Read More
Technology is changing the way we watch live sports. The innovation dates back decades, from the advent of the color TV, to the yellow augmented reality first down line, to high-def TV, to internet-powered streaming options. With software and hardware evolving at a rapid pace, what’s next for the industry? How will technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning affect live sports production? And when will the robots take over — if ever? We posed some of those questions to ESPN executives who help put together Monday Night Football (MNF) each week during the NFL season. Earlier this month… Read More
The next Associated Press story you read about a Major League Baseball game may have been written by a robot. Starting today, the global news network will publish MLB game preview stories automatically created by data-fueled machines built by Hero Sports, a Seattle-area startup that recently pivoted its business from a publishing site to a software-as-a-service platform called Data Skrive. Founded in 2014, Hero Sports spent the past several years growing a college sports news content production engine — but it was coming at a cost. The company was paying writers on a per-article basis and future profitability wasn’t looking good. That’s when… Read More
Chloe Kim thinks fears of robots taking over the world are overblown. The 18-year-old snowboarder, who won a gold medal in the snowboarding halfpipe at Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics, was one of the games’ most recognizable athletes and has since been propelled into superstardom. She won three ESPYs last week, most notably one for the best female athlete. And she was Microsoft’s special guest Wednesday in Seattle at the Imagine Cup world finals, the company’s annual student tech and innovation competition. She appeared with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on stage, and she says she predicted the ultimate win by Canadian team… Read More
News Brief: Computer scientists have trained a neural network to transform the action from pre-recorded videos of soccer games into immersive augmented-reality “holograms” you can shrink down onto a tabletop. The artificial-intelligence system developed by the University of Washington’s Konstantinos Rematas and colleagues analyzed 12,000 player models from FIFA, Electronic Arts’ soccer simulation game. Once the system learned to conceptualize the 3-D motions of soccer players, it could convert YouTube videos into 3-D renderings viewable via Microsoft’s HoloLens headset. Someday it may convert live World Cup matches on the fly. But for now, you’ll just have to check out the… Read More