Place RFID transmitters and receivers to cover the entire park (rugby / american football) maybe in the ground. Place super sticky RFID tags on the hands, feet, forelimbs and heads of the players . Place two tags at either end of the ball . Using the positional data of each individual tag, build a realtime stickfigure representaion of the game .

This data, with detailed textures ( a players face, body structure and like), then can be rendered from any position. Maybe you could pull textures from standard video on the day giving even more reality .

You could follow a player running full pace down the field from his/her shoulder. You could make selective players invisible and see into a pile of players . The ball could be seen at all times as a colourised wireframe . You could even view the whole game looking up from underneath through a transparent turf . Of course those ground hitting facial grimaces would have to be prerecorded or virtually generated .

I don't know how much computing power it would take but I am guessing it is a viable reality with desktop supercomputers on sale. If a wharehouse can cover a large number of products with RFID then 6 per player and 2 for the ball should be no problem .

At the low end, it might be possible to have a movie studio server farm, linked via a high capacity line, do the rendering, in game breaks, of selected highlights .
-- wjt, Jan 14 2009

Pretty close to my posting back in 2003 ;) "3D reconstruction of live sporting event" I don't believe RFID is the right technology for this however having the players wear something to assist in tracking might be an improvement over my proposal.
-- justinj, Feb 04 2010



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