Monday, January 29, 2001

Carnegie Mellon Provides Special Effects for Super Bowl Broadcast By SCOTT CARLSON Some university-born technology was on display in last night's Super Bowl. Television viewers saw it in a replay of Trent Dilfer's 38-yard touchdown pass to fellow Baltimore Raven Brandon Stokley. The camera started out facing the quarterback as he dropped back and wound up for the pass. Then the picture froze and wrapped around behind him to show the path of the pass. The technology is called EyeVision, and it was developed by CBS in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. About a year and a half ago, Larry Barbatsoulis and Craig Farrell, two technical directors working for CBS, decided they wanted to feature the Matrix-like special effects during the big game, but they needed a string of cameras that could move in synch, shooting the same action from different vantage points. Like the individual images in a cartoon, the subjects in the picture need to be precisely and consistently photographed; otherwise, the subjects will appear to "jump" around the screen. Mr. Barbatsoulis went online looking for robotics programs and found one at Carnegie Mellon. Since July, Takeo Kanade, director of the Robotics Institute, has been working full time on the project. On Friday, he was testing the system at a very noisy Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla. "This is the most demanding project of my whole career as a scientist," Mr. Kanade yelled into his cell phone as a loudspeaker above blared rock 'n' roll. "The idea of pointing all of those cameras to one spot on the field is easy to say, but to do that as precisely as they want is not a simple thing to do." The technology uses 33 cameras, mounted on robotic arms and synchronized to follow the focus of a lead cameraman automatically and precisely. Sensors track the lead camera's motion, zoom, and focus, and relay that data back to the robot cameras. The robotic components of the cameras were manufactured especially for this project by the Mitsubishi Corporation. The system requires "surprisingly little" computer power, Mr. Kanade says: One computer manages the coordination and signals of the main camera, another computer is assigned to each of the robot cameras, and two computers measure and calibrate the positions of the cameras relative to their subjects. Each of the cameras is also connected to a digital-disk recorder. After a playback-worthy pass, catch, or tackle, a playback operator can home in on the action and freeze it at a critical moment. "Then there is one last knob -- the revolve knob, which basically just takes the output of any one digital-disk recorder and puts it up on air," Mr. Barbatsoulis says. "So if I have disk recorders 1 through 30, and they're all frozen on the same image at the same time, now all I do is roll through the images -- click, click, click -- and it looks like you're revolving around the object." A number of parties hope to cash in on the project. In a press release that highlighted several technology-oriented tax breaks, Republican Gov. Tom Ridge touted Pennsylvania's brains in lieu of its brawn: "While the Steelers or Eagles won't be taking the field on Sunday, Pennsylvanians still can be proud that millions of football fans from around the world will enjoy watching a Pennsylvania product." CBS, for its part, has formed partnerships with two video-processing companies to sell the technology to other broadcasters. Mr. Barbatsoulis predicts that it will be used in everything from hockey to figure skating. "In individual sports, like gymnastics, I could do a 360 around someone doing a rings routine, or the long jump, or a pole vault," he says. "Imagine freezing a guy who's going backwards over the high jump, then revolving around him to show his form." Anne Watzman, a spokeswoman for the university, says that Carnegie Mellon isn't getting any hard cash out of the deal. "There are also some contractual agreements that aren't being publicized," she said. Mr. Kanade also would not give the details of the financial agreements. However, Ms. Watzman did note that CBS will give the university two 30-second commercials during this year's National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I men's-basketball tournament, in March. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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