2020 has been a tragic and momentous year. An abrupt disruption to how we work, live and socialize has forced new behaviors into our society, accelerated trends that were years away, and reframed discussions about how we can move, perform and play safely.
In all three areas — movement, performance and play — digital has become king. As social distancing becomes less needed — and certainly as people rediscover the joys of youth camps, team sports and full stadiums — the need to provide a digital layer on top of physical performance will become critical to winning. As in other sectors, such as healthcare and industrial, the possibilities of AI will complement, rather than replace, human endeavor in the world of sports. Individual, day-to-day, and continual analysis will be needed to achieve a competitive edge, and metrics — raw or visualized — will provide a constant layer on observation. Cloud-based, mobile-ready dashboards will be within reach as easily as notebooks or whiteboards, and data scientists will continue to join the ranks of the best, forward-leaning sports teams on the planet.
COVID-19 has not changed our overall mission at Ideas Lab — empowering athletes everywhere with advanced analytics — only focused our lens, accelerating the urgency of why our solution is critical in advancing the sports world in 2021 and beyond.
In Q4’20 we have continued:
- Expanding our tech stack
- Improving the robustness and accuracy of our AI models
- Growing our Taiwan office
- Developing our academic partnerships
- Turning our AI platform toward yoga
Each of these initiatives revolve around our central aim to build powerful markerless AI for sports and other instances of human movement.
Below we summarize many of these initiatives and invite you to connect with us here to learn more.
Let’s start with the most exciting stuff — our technology!
Technology
2D to 3D Analytics
As part of democratizing advanced analytics and putting it in the hands of everyone, anywhere, building a system to translate 2D to 3D is critical. This need has been echoed by the MLB and MiLB players we’ve spoken with over the last year (along with other sports).
Raw Data Analytics
Our primary objective during Q4 was laying the groundwork for advanced visualization of simultaneous data streams of raw motion data extracted from video sources. This raw data, including joint angles, velocity, displacement, angular velocity, and swing speed, will form the basis for future custom analytics including side by side comparisons and kinematic sequence analysis across various sports domains.
As you can see on the left side of this screen above, users will be able to upload and view various videos that can simply be uploaded and processed.
This will form part of our Video Uploader system. Clients will have the ability to upload their own videos into their own video gallery, which can then be shared with friends, coaches, or other professionals. Videos are asynchronously processed and notification sent when video processing is complete.
The aim, ultimately, is — in the words of one company we spoke with — to make dumb video smart!
API Development
The API is the gateway for both our external clients and as well as our own internal projects. A unified schema has been developed and is being leveraged across each of our core technologies so that these technologies can communicate with each other using a common language.
Hand Pose Technologies
Among the many use cases of analyzing hand pose is to translate sign language into text, as discussed in a fascinating Techcrunch article in 2019. Ideas Lab will be expanding our analysis of the body analysis into hand to add an additional level of analysis, extending our ability to move from bird’s eye view to individual player.
Another exciting element of this technology is the ability to simply use hand movement to execute specific actions. In this video, Winston is creating a happy face similar to what you imaging Tom Cruise might do in Minority Report. This is, of course, a crude example of the technology but you can imagine the many (endless) use cases for simply waving your hand to accomplish a given goal in the real world — whether it’s a customer making a ‘sign the check’ movement, captured by cameras in the restaurant, to alert waiters, Zoom-based K-12 education, or golf instructor-led direction across a digital channel on or off the golf course.
The following image is taken of a focus group we held on the current prototype of our hand pose technology.
Or it is a scene from Star Trek Discovery episode. Images are very similar :)
Multi Player Tracking
One of our core technologies, player tracking, has been implemented and testing is underway. This technology requires both player/person detection and player tracking and has the capability to provide rotation-enabled bounding box and player mask segmentation while retaining player identification.
University Partnerships
Q4 saw the approval of a joint partnership between the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST), National Taiwan University of Sports (NTUS), and Ideas Lab. This project’s objective is to determine spin rates using high speed cameras alone. Ball spin remains one of the most difficult challenges to deliver due to fast spin rates and high fidelity video sources requirements.
Company initiatives for 2021
Visualization around the Swing
In 2021, we’re focusing on having beautiful, informative and impactful visualization of our analytics across multiple sports domains. This requires combining our best-of-breed AI models and expertise on the specific metrics that matter.
Data accumulation
We’re reaching out to experts across multiple sports today, specifically to identify which metrics matter most in different sports activities. Our vision is to create an “Optimal Movement” across each sport context, whether jumping, stretching, pushing, pulling, or participating in a dizzying variety of physical movement to strengthen the mind and body. Optimal Movement would ultimately have to be contextually, based, in part, on 1) the physical dimensions of the player and 2) ideal movement (considered minimizing chance of injury and maximizing power). Outside of the mental grit and determination critical to being a great athlete is largely a problem of math, of angular relationships, velocity and geometry. Our goal is to create the best, most accurate and most usable translation of movement into measurements, to help anyone, anywhere become stronger with data.
For this, data is critical and we’ve been reaching out to coaches and individual athletes, alike, to share their data. It is also for this reason that Digital Fitness Platforms are the logical beneficiaries of our technology.
Are you a digital platform? Schedule a call to learn how our AI can help empower your customers today with data! Considerations on Product CommercializationAPI Development
Our clearest go-to-market is a robust API, discussed above, which can be leveraged by digital platforms around the world. The vision is that with a simple subscription, any digital platform can add our markerless analytics to their platform, empowering each subscriber with every workout. We are currently speaking with beta clients in the implementation of our beta API offering and have been reviewing the exciting (and growing) space of digital fitness.
Building the GOAT Yoga Product
There are some fantastic yoga apps leveraging markerless technology, such as zenia.app. The main problem is that these types of solutions leverage the same limited data set to analyze movements. Ideas Lab, in contrast, is working on integrating dozens of natural Yoga positions — but unnatural human positions that the public data sets of human movement (COCO) haven’t captured.With this, we can analyze a much greater range of movements than anything else in the market.
We’re working with a brilliant intern, Jose Tejeda out of Duke University, on this specifically. If interested in learning about this project further, feel free to reach out!
Ideas Lab wishes you and your family a very happy & healthy Holiday Season & New Years! May the tragedies and hardships of 2020 quickly blur as we speed forward to a better tomorrow!
ABOUT IDEAS LAB
Ideas Lab is an innovation lab and start-up studio building proprietary artificial intelligence, machine vision, and human motion analysis technologies. Today, while developing a suite of AI-based solutions, we are building a network of corporate and academic partners who will support our mission in improving human performance through advanced technology.
Visit us to learn more about Ideas Lab today!
