Blast Motion is building on its popular bat-sensor by utilizing smartphone cameras to calculate results data such as exit velocity, launch angle and projected distance through its new product, Blast Vision.
Harnessing patented computer vision techniques to produce nearly 3D images from a single camera — using at least an iPhone 6s or iPad Pro — Blast Vision will automatically edit video footage down to a four-second clip showing the swing of a batter or golfer along with accompanying metrics. That footage then can be exported and shared.
“What Blast Motion wanted to do — since we’ve already been working on the pre-impact side with our sensor technology and our apps — we are now able to show the user on that same swing, not only what happened in terms of a cause but what the effect was,” CEO Michael Fitzpatrick said. “By looking at those two together, they’re going to be able to, for the first time, see how changes in their swing can, in fact, produce a better result.”
While expensive launch monitors have been available to elite athletes for years through such companies as TrackMan, Flightscope, Foresight and HitTrax, Blast Motion is furthering a trend of democratizing technology by making it cheaper and more mobile. Previously, Rapsodo unveiled its smaller hit-tracking system last year, and HitTrax scaled its technology down to a mobile phone, albeit with some latency.
Fitzpatrick said that, not only will Blast Vision aid amateur athletes, but also he has received positive early feedback from pro clubs because of the tech’s portability granting real-time access to data on practice fields or in batting cages.
“We wanted to bring many of the functions that these more professional-oriented launch monitors have to the average person,” he said.
“You can set it up in your backyard, and you can hit basically anything you want. You could hit a Wiffle Ball, you could hit a tennis ball, you could hit it into a portable batting cage, whether it’s golf or it’s baseball.”
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For now, Blast Vision has been released as a standalone product, Fitzpatrick said, but the next phase of its rollout will include integration into the rest of the company’s suite of products such as its sensor tech and Blast Connect cloud.
“Our goal is, very simply, to provide a total solution,” he said.