Sitting in the stands down the first base line Thursday at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, I was feeling like a real fan, in my white Mariners jersey with GEEKWIRE on the back, Louisville Slugger baseball glove, Mariners spring training hat circa 2007, white Felix Hernandez socks, and noise-canceling headphones attached via cord to my portable AM-FM radio, perched between the seats in front of me for optimal reception. That’s when the guy a few seats to my left turned my way and made a humbling observation … he wondered if I was cosplaying as Steve Bartman. You may remember Bartman… Read More
Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. Amazon’s second headquarters may be closer to Seattle than you think. Amazon says it plans to grow its presence in Bellevue, in the Seattle suburbs, to 15,000 employees in the next few years. That could be comparable to the number of employees working in the official HQ2 site of Arlington, Va. Will the company find a friendlier climate in the ’burbs? Yes, Virginia, there is an Amazon HQ2, but it’s actually 10 miles outside of Seattle Amazon to bring 15,000 employees to Bellevue as rapid expansion in Seattle-area city… Read More
LOS ANGELES — Augmented reality on sports broadcasts isn’t new. In fact, there’s a gold standard: the first-down line for football games, invented two decades ago. Imagine the chaos and confusion in homes and sports bars across the country if they took that away. More recent additions to the genre include the virtual baseball strike zone, and the digital arc tracing the flight of a golf ball. So what about basketball? Can augmented reality provide anything so indispensable that NBA fans would howl in protest if it were taken away? Not yet. But the technology is impressive, and the potential is… Read More
A startup wants to help basketball players improve their jump shot — with just a smartphone. Among the flurry of announcements made at its press event on Wednesday, Apple showed off HomeCourt, a new iPhone app that uses augmented reality to track basketball shots. AR tech built into the iPhone — including the new A12 Bionic chip — and artificial intelligence technology developed by HomeCourt maker Nex Team can detect a hoop and basketball to measure kinematics, trajectory, release times, and number of shots made. Apple brought out former NBA star point guard Steve Nash and a Nex Team founder… 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
