Virtual Eye News

Virtual Eye turned up to the 2015 BMW NZ Open with a bag full of tricks. That bag of tricks was represented by 3 vans completely full of equipment. The standard golf team had to call in a few ring-ins in the form of JJ (IT and system director), Stu (all-round handyman), Video Factory (field edit team), Chris Haig (genius) and Zeke (SwingProfile). Everyone arrived in Arrowtown on a sunny Sunday and got to work.

The field edit team was straight into their work with some AMAZING pieces on the owners of Milbrook (Mr Ishi) and The Hills (Sir Michael Hill). They were also choppered up to Cecil Peak for a special Hole-in-One golf competition for some of the players. Their stunning shots were edited and posted on youtube and reached 1000 views almost instantly.

One of our latest integrations has been with a company called SwingProfile, founded by Zeke Chan. Zeke has spent a few days in Dunedin working with our golf team to bring his patented swing analysis software from Apple IOS systems into a broadcast quality product. After some tweaks and improvements we had SwingProfile feature and become an important part of the NZ Open this year.

The veteran golf team were on site in their usual capacity showing the ball positions of the two feature groups each day, as well as the ideal way to play each hole. The Hills course model was looking spectacular thanks to some recently filmed footage from our drone-man Aaron, and some software and design magic from the geniuses in the office.

All in all the week went really well. The team got lots of good stuff to air and compiled a list of things to improve as we prepare for our next trip away in a few days. Looking forward to see what Seattle has to offer the Virtual Eye Golf Team.

February began with Virtual Eye Golf already covering the Omega Dubai Desert Classic, which was followed by the Australian Women's Open in Melbourne and the Volvik RACV Ladies Masters on the Gold Coast. Virtual Eye Cricket started the month in Perth, providing ball-tracking and graphics for Australia vs England in the final of the ODI Tri Series - 2 days later they were in Napier covering the 2nd NZ vs Pakistan ODI.

Next up was the ICC Cricket World Cup, with Virtual Eye Cricket covering Pool A games in Christchurch, Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland. Virtual Eye Sailing covered the Fujairah Grand Prix of the 2015 Skydive Dubai XCAT World Series, and continued our coverage of the Volvo Ocean Race 2014-2015 on Leg 4 from Sanya to Auckland.

Silverhook Racing founder Nigel Hook, and Virtual Eye CEO Ian Taylor took to the stage at IBM Interconnect 2015 in Las Vegas with an update on our real-time Powerboat application. Built in 3 weeks last year, and a great example of cloud collaboration between 5 companies spread all around the globe, the application harnesses the "data ocean" as powerboats race through the real one. Real time analysis is essential to the SilverHook operation - if there’s a problem with an engine during racing the team need to deal with it immediately, or the engine could blow up.