This post is the sixth installment of our #SportsInSTEM Series, which explores, demonstrates, and illuminates how sport serves as a vehicle to train and enlighten students of all ages in pursuing interests and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. If you or someone you know is using sports to help with STEM education, then please let us know so we can include their work in our series.
One of the most intriguing NFL Drafts in recent years kicks off today and thankfully questions will finally be answered about where the top talents of this class will land. But of course, the main source of intrigue comes from Johnny Manziel. Opinions about the polarizing QB cover all points on the boom or bust spectrum. For months fans, draft experts and TV pundits have had mixed feelings about where Manziel will be drafted, as made evident by the most recent Sports Illustrated Issue,
Manziel is a lightning rod for scrutiny and attention due to his skills, personality and position. As a quarterback he will be called upon to be the leader of an NFL offense. Teams can do their best to judge his on-field leadership skills and ability to analyze a defense, make the proper reads, call out blitz coverages, etc., but so far there is no specific way to for coaches and scouts to actually see how Manziel reads the field. However, a team of senior engineer students from Georgia Tech believe they have a solution for this QB analysis issue.
Jonathan Dernlan, Nick Austin, Jordan Conant and David Yoon, (the QB Vision Team) designed and built the Quarterback Eye Direction Tracking Helmet. This product can precisely track eyes and helmet position to determine where a QB is looking during a live practice. It can be used by all players but was specifically designed for quarterback use. The Helmet is strictly for practice and gives players and coaches a new and invaluable way to track and record how a quarterback analyzes the field and the opponent in a game situation.
The QB Eye Direction Tracking Helmet has a camera mounted on the facemask that records the quarterback’s pupil movement. The Helmet also has a magnetometer to record the angular direction of the QB’s head. Between these two pieces of hardware the Helmet can locate the position of the wearer in the video, portray the player’s field of vision (including peripherals) and sight direction and then output reviewable video with indicators of the wearer’s eyes. This video can then be broken down by coaches to see how well the player is reading the defense, picking up his receivers and performing all sorts of other football X’s and O’s.
To track the player’s eyes the QB Vision Team used a clever method. They implemented an image segmentation algorithm that created a binary image where a pixel is given a one value if it is classified as black and a zero value if it is any other color. Because all pupils are black, the camera that is fixed on the player’s face used this algorithm to detect what the pupils are looking at and when. This information is then used to create the video that shows players and coaches where the QB’s eyes are looking.
The whole project was run on National Instrument’s LabView Software. This is the type of software that engineers would use when joining the workforce and it provided excellent real-world engineering experience for these four Georgia Tech students. Not only did they get to hone STEM skills but they applied their learning to the game of football. Talk about a fun and memorable learning environment.
Currently there are no similar football helmet devices available that have these types of tracking capabilities. But as the QB Vision Team will attest, there is still plenty of room for future improvements on their design. The most needed improvement would be to use a less cumbersome camera with a faster frame rate to make the eye motion indicators on the outputted video more accurate.
The QB Eye Direction Tracking Helmet would certainly have played a main role in analyzing quarterbacks in this year’s draft. It could have provided valuable football-related information about Johnny Manziel and perhaps helped teams decide to draft the Heisman winner or not. But for now NFL scouts and coaches can only hope that future Georgia Tech engineering students will improve upon the clever sports tech product that the QB Vision Team created.
