So, when can we expect some TV exec to enhance coverage by adding “velocity vision” to the tennisball, ala NHL on Fox? Seriously though, I think you lose something important if players can challenge umpires, mainly the McEnroe-style hissy fits over bad calls that make TV Tennis so entertaining.

They actually have all sorts of advanced “velocity vision” type stuff this time around. There’s this one thing they do, I forget what it’s called, it’s like “ULTRACAM BY IBM” or something. All it is is an ultra-slow motion, really detailed video of a single hit. It even has it’s own theme music that they play whenever it comes on. Actually, it’s really cool, you can see where they player is looking, the ball squashing against the racket, and the vibrations of the strings and stuff.

They also have another one where as the player moves around the court, he leaves behind little ghost images wherever he makes a hit, so you can see how far he had to travel during a point. The ghost images move around and scale correctly as the camera pans too, pretty neat trick.

Also when a player does a particularly cool jumping smash shot, they take each frame of the video and clip the player out and put them all next to each other, but somehow seamlessly overlayed on the background of the tennis court. I think they do this one just because they can.

Swing cam or swing shot. Swing something.

SWINGVISION!

I hate sports. I used to be able to enjoy tennis at least, but even that is destroyed. You should never do anything in a sport that requires a “judge”. Back when all these games were invented, they were played by fat stupid people who move really slow and are too near sighted to see the hoop. It probably never occured to them that the future would spawn competitiveness with such ferocity that only a mix of computers and lasers can separate winners from losers. The whole thing makes me sick. Like whoever it was who decided that purposely fouling somebody in Basketball was a good idea needs to be shot. I hope those jerks never get their claws into hiking, if they ruin that for me, by gods, I will mop space and time with their bloody corpses.

[tweeeeeeeet!!!] “Illegal stride at Hezekiah’s Knob! 15-yard penalty, hiker #87 must switch to White Trail.”

Let’s have a look at that again, on HIKERVISION by IBM.