Whatever your favorite sport is it’s often hard to pick out what individual players or coaches are saying due to all the noise. If the referee is giving a player an earful the commentator usually has to explain what for and guess at the specifics. What a coach is feeling is usually garnered from their body language not what they are shouting at the ref or discussing with assistants.
That is all set to change through the use of a new microphone system developed by physicists Morgan Kjølerbakken and Vibeke Jahr. It’s called AudioScope, but was formerly known as the “supermicrophone”.
It consists of 300 microphones installed as a circle above a play area which are calibrated to a fixed camera that can zoom in to any point. Using the same principles as sonar technology the microphones can relay the sound from the exact area the camera is focused on meaning we can listen in to conversations without the general background sound getting in the way.
As the video demonstrates, you can even hear a guy popping chewing gum at a very noisy basketball game.
A company has been formed by the physicists called Squarehead Technology and patents issued. They are currently in discussions to get AudioScope installed at major sporting venues.
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What do you guys think? Would it be better for sport matches or not? Aside of having better entertainment moments on the TV, would this be against the privacy rights of coach-player conversations? Revealing tactics? What officials have to say? What angry players utter in the heat of a game?
What are your thoughts?
