Weird title... I know right? But it's true, it's exactly what happened.
My mom came to me with a puzzle of some sort. She asked me to watch this particular video.
I wasn't allowed to look at the title of the video of course. My mom just asked me to tell what I thought was wrong. I did this exercise with my dad.
The first thing I noticed was that the camera was always focusing on the referee after a short interval. My mother's excitement slowly started growing.
My mom tried to hint something was wrong. I caught the hint and said, "Yeah! The camera's supposed to be following the ball right?"
I initially thought that the referee was giving red or yellow cards to a player and hence the camera was focusing on him.
Later realized through mom's nudging that the cameras had inbuilt AI technology.
Then it struck me. I had my EUREKA moment. BAZINGA even.
The camera was following the ball referee's head thinking it was a ball.
Wanna know how I know?
THIS MEME!!!
I had seen it the day before.
I passed it off as a fake initially, didn't think much of it. I mean really, AI can't be that stupid right? Phhhfffttt.
Apparently, it is funny.
While I was in a melancholy mood for the referee. My mom enthusiastically stated she felt pity for the organizers who coded the software.
I felt like doing some digging.
The football game was played in the Caledonian Stadium in Inverness, Scotland. The stadium plays host to the home matches of Scottish Professional Football League club Inverness Caledonian Thistle.
All this information is from Wikipedia.
Next, I wanted to find out was which unfortunate teams were playing that day. They wouldn't have been very happy to hear that a referee had stolen their thunder. I decided to type away again in search.
A few keystrokes later, thanks to an article from Hindustan Times, the two teams that were playing were the Iverness football team and Ayr United. It was the Scottish Football Championship. No wonder fans were disappointed.
The next thing I wanted to check out was, which company made that software. Here we go again...
After several minutes of cumbersome surfing, I found an article on Futurism which stated, "The club proudly announced that it would be switching to the novel camera technology, called Pixellot, with in-built, AI, ball-tracking technology to produce live HD footage."
Haha. I need to learn more about Pixellot.
Found it!
LINK: https://www.pixellot.tv/
This is the official webpage for Pixellot, an AI camera system specifically designed for sports games. It claims to reduce the production costs for sports games. Well true, less manpower would be needed. Unfortunately, fans were enraged after this rendevous. I mean who wouldn't be if they had to pay $13 for a ticket to watch it from home due to COVID. Actually, I would have been amused.
PIXELLOT mainly provides its services to the games in Germany, Isreal, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the United States.
A major client of Pixellot is... surprise surprise!!!... FC Barcelona, the beloved Spanish football club.
With FC in Spain, Pixellot has helped to broadcast Korean handball games and Israeli soccer and basketball to name a few.
Regional soccer (Fussball) games in Germany, have been filmed by the AI company.
Pixellot is definitely working hard to achieve greatness in the field of AI SPORT. However, according to Craft.co, Pixellot has quite a few competitors such as Digital West Imaging, Zepcam, Getac Video Solutions, and BRK.
One can only imagine whether this incident was a big blow to the company or not.
This incident was definitely amusing and gave some insight into the field of AI and its progress in the sports department.
Needless to say, we have a far way to go if we want robots to conquer us someday. Till then, baby steps lead the way.
For the record, Iverness won that match. Yup. They took it home.
Or maybe the referee took the whole 'Be the ball' schtick a little too literally?