Cool, Cool Stuff

So on Thursday, I got some 'hands on' time on one of our new products that is going to blow away the viewer (well, maybe not - but if they knew how technologically cool it is - it would).

As you may know - if you've been reading my blog - our system allows us to know where each car is down to 3/4 of an inch on the actual track.

Now, imagine that you take that 'real time' knowlege and marry it to a virtual (animated) video of the cars on the track. What's been done by the geniuses in the Sportvison HOS (hall of science) is to make a program - that looks kinda like a video game. You make the world that the game exists in - to be the exact track that you're racing on. And when I say exact track - I mean the exact track. Every single inch is made to match the track - complete with the fence posts around the track being exactly in the same place and the banked turns being EXACT. I think you understand what I'm saying here - exact.

Then you make a model of each car that's dimensionally exact- and you make the 'skins' for that car look exactly like the real thing.

So, marrying our GPS location technology for EVERY car on the track - with this animated recreation - we can run the actual race in a virtual reality in REAL TIME. I hope this is making sense so far - it it's not let me know and I'll explain further.

Now, the question would be - so why would anyone want to watch the animated race instead of the real race? The answer is - you don't watch it instead of the real race - you watch it as PART of the real race. Not only does this REAL TIME animated race exist - but we can show animated (camera angles) from ANYWHERE along this race.

This means, that if a particular passing sequence is exciting (and I suppose they can be exicting - I'm not a Nascar fan), we can make an instant replay of the pass from any point of view we want. We can show the pass from inside one of the cars that's being passed, we can show it from a viewpoint 15 feet in front, behind, beside, under, above - ANYWHERE.

We unveiled this new product to the director and producer yesterday and they went bonkers for it. Here's a cool thing - I may be one of the 'back up' operators for it. The design of the program is much like a camera operator and a 'non-linear editor' combined. (A non-linear editor is a program you use to make video with and most people who know me know that I can make a mean video and pretty quickly and efficiently). So, I have some good skills that I think will lend to me operating this puppy in the future. The full time gig will go to someone who works the whole season.

Anyway, this new product alone may be worth checking out the Bud Shootout tomorrow.

Other than that, I did some camera registrations (getting things set up for the show basically) and I had to be on standby for a number of hours yestersday. The 'no see ums' (tiny little gnat style bugs) were really bad on the roof, so we found a place just below to wait on some technical stuff to happen before we went to the cameras. We had our radios and could be at the cameras in 2 minutes from the time called - but we ended up having to wait for hours due to some software and hardware bugs that were finallly ironed out by the geniuses.

The spot we found to wait was pretty posh. It's a skybox- and we just watched the cars go round and round the track during practice. Not a bad gig (although I prefer actually working rather than waiting - but hey, it's my job - I can handle it).