Football finds its LeMatch

Football fans could enjoy completely personalised and interactive coverage of future World Cup games with live match statistics and online betting, thanks to research from the IST.

The LeMatch project links together existing media channels, Internet, TV, and telephone, to offer a wide variety of services for journalists, VIPs, broadcasters, advertisers and supporters.

IST is working with leading players in broadcasting, sport and interactive technology, including NBC and Yahoo to produce a sports production platform for producing and delivering adaptive interactive cross media content with a focus on live and real-time content.

Called CSP, the platform uses three key technologies: an object tracking module, an interactive and statistical module, and an enhanced graphics and virtual advertising module.

The object-tracking module uses specialised cameras to follow the movement of the ball and individual players. The statistical module can then use this information to render a variety of real-time data, like how far individual players have run in the game, who had the fastest sprint, the total aggregate of distance run for the team, how hard the ball is kicked or how fast it moves.