While watching ice hockey on TV one night, I saw that the puck had been artificially highlighted with a special color so audiences could see it easier. And during football viewing, the 10-yd-line has a computer generated yellow highlight as well.

I believe televised sporting events could be much more exciting if more CG effects were thrown into the games. I assume it would be more difficult to do with a live game, as opposed to a "taped earlier" thing, but either way it'd be cool.

If television gives us more options in the future, users should be able to enable various special FX for the game by punching some button on the remote control. During a volleyball game, for instance, a spiking of a ball should spark a large fire between the player's hand and the ball. As the ball travels at a particularly fast rate, a stream of "light energy" (technobabble) would trail from it. As the ball smacks into the sand, FX could throw a huge pile of sand through that area, as if a small meteor crashed in that area, as opposed to a tiny ball. The impact of the ball would also shake the screen violently, things would fall out of the sky, as if a weapon of the gods had been used.

The ball would appear to disappear into the sand, only to reappear magically in the hand's of one of the player as he serves again.

For football, running backs and recievers could trail those "light energy" beams as they speed across the field. Their bodies would blur as if traveling past light speed, similar to what one can find in your average console sports game (Playstation, Dreamcast, etc) introduction movie.

For racing and other sports where people the game is about moving around (ex: skiing), "warp speed light beams" (Star Trek warp effect) could shoot past the participants. For NASCAR, car wrecks could be liberally spiced up with larger explosions and smoke plumes.

This could all be done, possibly, by tagging various parts of the field/players in a computer system. The computer would keep track of the speed of cars, hands, balls, feet, etc so as to know what special effect should be used. Well, you get the idea.
-- go77, Aug 22 2001

One Man And His Dog http://www.qwertyui...ne_man_and_his_dog/
Explanation for non-UK readers [hippo, Aug 22 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]

|> / ; ; ; \<|
| / ; ; ; ; \ |
|/ ; ; ; ; ; \|
|............|
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Aaaaah, the joys of skiing
-- thumbwax, Aug 23 2001


Sounds fantastic indeed. Attendence at games might drop, though, as people became enamored of the FX version of play. Or one could display all sporting events as ASCII art (nice one, thumbwax!), which would have the opposite effect.
-- Dog Ed, Aug 23 2001


...and then eventually it would evolve into something right out of Tron...

(But if we get to see lightcycling, I'm not complaining.)
-- mrkillboy, Aug 23 2001


I'd like to be able to change the skins on different players like you can in Quake and all those other first-person shootemups.
-- sdm, Aug 23 2001


Great Idea - but wouldn,t Boxing just look & sound like a Rocky Film (Sounds of sledghammers on sheet metal, Mr T winding up looking & sounding like a steamtrain) I suppose the thing to do would be to include comedy cartoon FX and sounds - I,m thinking Tom & Jerry meets The Mask - now THAT would be amusing
-- gnomethang, Aug 23 2001


Ahh Unabubba, with that I would disagree. Anyone who plays golf and saw the last five holes of the USPGA with Michaelson and Toms would probably agree with me that this was just about as rivetting as sport gets (honest).
-- goff, Aug 23 2001


<slightly off-topic> I only realised recently, watching some crappy cable channel in the US, that Rollerball was actually played. It seemed to be slightly less violent than the version portrayed in the film and involved a larger number of buxom, scantily-clad women.</slightly off-topic>

They should bring back "One man and his dog" with these CG effects.
-- hippo, Aug 23 2001


waugs, I've seen similar effects on American football broadcasts. I think at some point we'll be able to outfit an arena with a multitude of cameras not just ringing the arena, but at different elevations as well, and use the "bullet time" and sophisticated morphing technologies to be able to allow the program director to zoom the point of view all over the field at will during real time (or maybe with a minimal delay). Ultimately, it'd be best to be able to broadcast all the video feeds and install the processing hardware on the viewer's TV so he could select his own viewpoints, but this would require huge bandwidth and expensive replication of the processing hardware.

Believe it or not, I "invented" this before the bullet-time technology was ever publicized, though it turns out "they" were already in the process of developing it when I had my idea.
-- beauxeault, Aug 23 2001


I like this. Nice one, go77.
-- iuvare, Aug 23 2001



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