The virtual yellow line in NFL broadcasts is great.
It tells viewers how far the offense needs to advance for a first down.
It looks really simple and elegant but creating that line was a massive engineering challenge.
It started in the mid 90s when the Fox Sports network tried to make hockey easier to watch.
“Scientists at Fox Sports laboratories are working on new technology.”
"You won't believe your eyes."
They embedded infrared transmitters inside the puck and placed sensors around the rink,
So that live tv viewers saw a blue glow around the puck at all times and a red comet tail
if it traveled over 70 miles per hour. Hockey fans didn’t really embrace “glow
puck” as it came to be known. So the technology was retired when the broadcasting
rights for hockey switched to ABC a few years later.
But the team of engineers they had assembled for the project was just getting started.
They left Fox Sports to create a new company called SportVision.
and in 1998, they debuted the “First and Ten” line on ESPN.
“Until now, this marker was the only reference fans in the stadium and at home had
for the first down.” The key challenge in making the yellow line
is that the scene is constantly changing, which means the yellow line has to constantly
change. Not only are there 3 different cameras used
for the wide shots of the field, each camera pans, tilts and zooms to follow the action.
So the first thing Sportvision does before the game is create a 3D mathematical model
of each football field using laser surveying tools.
And during the game they gather data from the cameras about their pan, tilt, and zoom positions
for every single frame. So when the operator specifies that the first
down is at the 43rd yard line, for example, the computers combine the camera data with
their own model of the field to draw the yellow line in the proper perspective
..and to redraw it, for every frame being broadcast to viewers.
The final step is what makes the line kind of magical -- removing any part of the line obstructed
by players, refs or the ball so that the line looks like it’s underneath them, almost
painted on the field. The way the computers know which pixels to
remove is by sampling the colors - think of the field as a giant green screen.
But anyone who has worked with green or blue screens knows that you need a really uniform
and evenly lit background for it to work well. So Sportvision identifies in advance which
shades of green and brown are in the field given the lighting conditions -- those are
the colors to be covered by the yellow line. And they identify which colors are in the
players uniforms and should never be covered by yellow.
It works amazingly well. Here’s the Packers, wearing green, in the rain. No problem.
It only fails in the most extreme weather, like this 2013 game in Philly. The line ends
up all over players, but on the other hand the system was helpfully used to insert the
yardage numbers that had been covered up with snow.
The whole yellow line process delays the live broadcast by less than a second.
And not surprisingly, it was an immediate success. Sportvision won an Emmy for it,
and went on to make virtual visual aids for NASCAR, baseball, sailing and the Olympics.
And football broadcasts have since added more graphics, like the line of scrimmage and perhaps
unnecessary large arrows showing the same information that’s in the scorebox.
But if that’s annoying consider this: This type of technology is being used insert
ads into stadiums and onto fields for a lot of sports broadcasts.
But the NFL doesn’t allow it. In the grand tradition of the yellow line, the graphics
on the field are not there to sell you things, but to help you follow the game.