Since its adoption in 2018 until now, VAR, or Video Assistant Referee technology, has been the subject of controversy among teams and football fans. Although it helped reduce repeated errors, calculating or canceling goals, and offsides. However, this technique did not work as expected, and there are still many refereeing errors caused by the VAR technique. For this reason, the English Football League decided to abandon VAR technology and replace it with devices IPhoneWhat's the story?


The iPhone replaces the VAR

The English Premier League announced that it will use Apple phones in Premier League matches in order to monitor offside violations and improve the capabilities of the mouse. To do this, he contracted with Genius Sports, a company known for its optical tracking technology and data-driven work in the NBA.

Genius Sports will use a machine learning-based system known as “Dragon.” The system relies on a group of smartphones and uses the cameras of those phones to capture videos at high frame rates from multiple angles. The system then allows those phones to communicate with each other effectively to process all the visual data collected by the cameras. In order to create a 3D model of the players' bodies.


How the Dragon system works

As for how the Dragon intrusion detection system works in the Premier League, it is as follows: iPhone cameras will capture between 7000 and 10000 points on the players’ bodies. This should help detect intrusions, no matter how small the difference. With these thousands of points, it will be easier for the match referee to call or cancel offside more accurately than with the VAR. Genius Sports said it will use 28 iPhones (a mix of iPhone 14 and 15) in English Premier League stadiums. It is possible to increase the number of devices to 100 iPhones in the future.


Why iPhone?

 You may be wondering why iPhones, the answer is simple. Today's iPhones are as powerful as the world's greatest supercomputers 20 years ago. While other modern optical tracking systems require expensive fiber optic cables and servers to connect complex cameras to computers tasked with managing the data being collected, today's $1000 smartphones are able to handle these complex tasks smoothly and quickly.

In addition, the high frame rate on both the iPhone 14 and 15 will help to understand the start of the game, when the player made the pass, and when the ball left his feet. Initially, smartphones will record at only 100 fps, but the rate may rise to up to 200 fps in the future. Since recording videos non-stop for 90 minutes will cause the iPhone to heat up. Apple phones will be stored in a designated place to ensure their cooling in addition to protecting them from rain. It will also be permanently connected to the charger.

Finally, FIFA was used in the 2022 World Cup hosted by Qatar as well as this year's European Championship. Semi-automatic infiltration system. This system creates a few dozen points on each player's body by relying on 10 to 15 cameras in addition to a sensor on the ball. However, this system is still not perfect and has some blind spots, such as when players are too close. Also, the number of cameras is not enough to cover all angles while playing. Thus, the powerful specifications and features that the iPhone possesses will help football referees in making decisions quickly and accurately, unlike VAR, which caused arbitration scandals in addition to the fact that it took a lot of time for the game to be analyzed.

Do you think the iPhone will succeed in its mission, tell us in the comments

Source:

wired-

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