There are a few threads that weave in and out of my thirty-odd years, one of those being the Cricket World Cup. One of the more interesting ones for me was the 1996 series hosted by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Interesting not because of the performances or results, but the way in which I followed the games. The time difference was a bit rough and we didn’t have Sky at home so I was reduced to listening to the game in bed on the wireless. I have a delicious memory of Jeremy Coney and Brian Waddle spending the best part of five overs discussing the sandwiches they’d had for lunch that day. Two of the best, no doubt.
What made it a little interesting though was the addition of a cricket simulation I found on the interweb to compliment the radio commentary. Compliment perhaps being somewhat generous, as the simulator was about three balls behind the radio so I got to hear a savoured description of events from the chaps at the ground a few minutes before actually seeing the action played out on a laptop using some of the worst graphics I’ve ever seen. The concept was pretty simple – the developers built a handful of stock-standard cricket shots in the computer simulation and a dude sat watching the game and logging it ball-by-ball in a data feed. When one of the real-world players hit a nice cover drive the simulator would pick that up in the data feed and display what looked somewhat like a cover drive by what looked somewhat like a cricketer on the laptop.
Cricinfo.com 3D Simulator
Ten years on, and such simulators are far more advanced. The latest contains not only a huge improvement in graphics quality, but a much wider range of shots and deliveries – and therefore reflects the Canucks whomping the Black Caps all over the park at the mo’ (109/1 – what the hell is going on!?) much more realistically. But the coolest improvement is the number of ‘camera’ angles available to watch the ‘live’ action. There are the classic angles that you tend to see on TV, and you can tweak those at will – but there are also player-specific angles, sweeeet… You can choose to view the action from the perspective of the bowler, wicketkeeper, batsman or even umpires (yep, even square leg). And the detail even goes down to the movement of the batsman’s head as he follows the ball onto his bat.
While there have been some obvious improvements in the quality of these simulations in the past decade, as long as humans are used to translate real-world action into a digital feed there is going to be an upper limit in how well the simulation reflects the action on the pitch. This is because the human observer has a limited ‘vocabulary’ in which to describe the action e.g. ‘cover drive’, ‘square cut’, ‘reverse sweep’ rather than the actual range of physical intricacies which make up variations of those shots and everything in-between. But technology is coming along which could take that human ‘translator’ out of the equation. There are motion sensors in even a kids toy like the Nintendo Wii that can capture, record and process movement along three dimensional axes. Combining such technology with elements like the grain-sized RFID tags used to track legit cigarettes and pay for bar drinks could mean multiple sensors are sewn into players kits and embedded in bats, balls and wickets – providing a real-time feed of movement and action to a point where the action simulated digitally is almost identical to what’s going on down on the pitch. Add in advancement in graphics and screens to display them and we might actually get to a point where a simulated, digital representation of cricketing reality is virtually indistinguishable to what we see on TV.
While the quality of simulation and graphics has been moving along at a reasonable pace, and could proceed a lot more in coming years, the concept being used right now is pretty much the same as it was in 1996 – real life gets translated into a data feed which is played out in the computer simulation. But the really interesting possibilities, for my money, will be new ways in which to use that data feed.
Once there’s a solid data feed for these simulators, what’s to stop parts of it being plugged into interactive simulations i.e. video games? There are games out there now that allow you to play scenarios like, for example, the last ten overs of a particular historical match – the ‘scenario’ being that you start on the same score and in the same stadium as was played out in the actual game. But plugging in a data feed of the ball-by-ball action from that match means you can actually face the exact deliveries and field settings that were bowled in that match. There are obvious constraints – once you hit the ball it’d have to switch from the data feed to a simulated response, but the next delivery could kick back to the data feed again. You could, if you wanted to, face an entire historical innings from any game you wanted.
And playing in such interactive simulations needn’t necessarily be after-the-fact. There’s nothing to stop the data feed being whacked into a video game realtime. It’s possible you could be standing in your lounge with a Wii-type controller, and a projected image on the wall of Brett Lee starting his run-up towards you at the same time Lou Vincent is facing the actual delivery in the last ball of the World Cup on the other side of the planet. With maybe Jeremy and Coney talking sandwiches… Just like being there…