JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The NFL announced this week that it will use a high-tech system of cameras in the upcoming season to track the ball down the field and determine whether a team gets a first down. Sony's Hawk-Eye system will be installed in all 30 NFL stadiums. And the NFL says it'll save time over the traditional chain measurements, though they do say that the chain crew will stay on the field as a backup. Now, Hawk-Eye already has a long history with other sports like tennis, cricket, soccer and rugby. And Kevin Nguyen at The Verge has written about it. Hey there.
KEVIN NGUYEN: How's it going?
SUMMERS: I am doing well. So, Kevin, I know that you went to a tennis match where Hawk-Eye was in use. And you went up to the sort of command center that's called the Hawk-Eye Nest. Give us the view from there. How does this all work?
NGUYEN: Yeah. Basically, they have - maybe pun intended - a bird's-eye view of the match, and it's just a bunch of nerds at a bunch of computers. They're all, like, in their 20s. And what's kind of fun is, like, they are in charge of the integrity of, you know, all the important things that are happening on the court.
SUMMERS: So one question that I have as a big sports fan is whether or not Hawk-Eye really is more accurate than traditional measurements. I mean, I think we've all seen and remember those sort of controversial calls. I wonder if this will reduce conflict between players and refs and all those disagreements that we might see.
NGUYEN: Yeah. I mean, in tennis especially, there's just a lot of evidence that Hawk-Eye is a lot more reliable than the human eye. Traditionally for, you know, a hundred years, line judges were used to call balls in and out in tennis, and oftentimes they were quite wrong. So, you know, all of the tests have shown that Hawk-Eye is much more reliable. And players really like it, too. Players trust Hawk-Eye more than they trust the line judges. And maybe the more important thing is you can't really yell at a technology system the way you can yell at a chair umpire.
SUMMERS: Yeah. So I was looking at the NFL's press release when they announced this change, and they pointed out that Hawk-Eye partners with, like, 23 of the top 25 global sports leagues. I mean, that's so many sports that are using this technology. How did it get its start?
NGUYEN: I mean, people associate Hawk-Eye with tennis because the technology is publicly called Hawk-Eye there, but Hawk-Eye is in nearly anything you watch. It was founded by this guy named Paul Hawkins, so he kind of named it after himself - Hawk-Eye. And originally it was made for cricket, but he found it much more applicable to tennis and just got a lot more pickup there.
And the way the Hawk-Eye system works in tennis, it's 12 cameras that are positioned around the court. Only eight are used at a time. Four of them are actually backups in case of any failure. And it basically just triangulates where the ball is headed. So not only is it tracking players, the net, the ball, but it's actually trying to measure, through math, like, how the ball is going to hit the court. So it's kind of predicting, actually, through physics where the ball is going to land. And it just works quite well.
SUMMERS: Interesting. So aside from producing measurements that help officials call the game, are there other ways that Hawk-Eye has changed the game of tennis for people who are either watching in person or watching the games on their TV?
NGUYEN: Yeah. Hawk-Eye actually started implemented in tennis as a broadcast enhancement so people watching at home could see where the ball landed. But it wasn't an official measurement, so it's not like the chair umpire or any of the line judges had access to what Hawk-Eye was seeing. So there was this kind of funny disconnect where at home, you actually had more information than the people on the court. So eventually, they started rolling out Hawk-Eye as a challenge system.
So if a player believed that a line judge had gotten a call wrong, which they do somewhat frequently, a player had a number of challenges. And they'd put their finger in the air, and that would activate Hawk-Eye. And then everyone - the player, the line judges and everyone in the audience - would watch as kind of this slow-motion animation would pop up and then slowly reveal the exact placement of the ball on the court, whether it was in or out. So it had actually a lot of great drama back in the day.
SUMMERS: Kevin Nguyen is deputy features editor at The Verge. Thank you so much, Kevin.
NGUYEN: Cool. Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
