Fifa Looks At Electronic Augmentation

The [Fédération Internationale de Football Association] is joining the growing list of professional sports that is adopting technological means in an attempt to help the human referees. After a botched call in 2010 the organization called for a system that would work day or night, with 100% accuracy and the ability to report to the Refs in less than 1 second. The applicants have been weeded out and it comes down to two systems, both of which use a piece of personal hardware we’re quite familiar with. [Fe80], who sent in the tip, recognized the TI Chronos eZ430 watch in the image above.

The two systems both use the watch as an interface, but work very differently. The first, called GoalRef, uses a sensor suspended inside the ball. This detects a magnetic field made up by the goal posts. We’d guess it’s an inductance sensor that is triggered when it passes a coil in the goal posts (we didn’t find much in the way of technical info so please do your own speculation in the comments). The second system is very familiar. It’s the Hawkeye camera system used by the APT (Tennis) in all the major tournaments.

12 thoughts on “Fifa Looks At Electronic Augmentation

  1. In the end, the winning system will be chosen not by the most impressive tech, but by the company with the best FIFA connections and under-the-table kickbacks – and that probably means Hawkeye will get the contracts.

    However, very cool to see a chronosport applied to something like this.

  2. Hawkeye will make financial sense, as it would be a one off cost for the stadium, but for the sensor-in-ball system each team would want many of the balls for practice as the performance would almost certainly differ from a normal ball.

    1. yeh, no need to invent something but I see no reason not to do like in icehockey. If the ref is in doubt he can get the video ref to look at the video available and if theres it clear evidence the call was wrong it is changed if not it stands.

      I think the big problem is when tv can show video that the call is clearly wrong seconds after it happened but the ref can’t use the same video to correct it

      The rules even say that any controversial calls etc. cannot be shown on the big screen on the stadium

  3. I should get into football. People just seem so fucking involved with it. More so then US football or any other sport!

    I agree with Whatnot. Some human randomness should be part of the game otherwise games would fall into a computer simulation.

    A great idea with this is that people can program real life games and the watch tells everything to you! It’s like real sports becomes the arcade!
    This could be done with a cell phone for a wider audience.

  4. There is still randomness in the game from the match officials, they still make bad calls. The fans and everyone else get to see the replays instantly but FIFA have been kicking up because they believe it will slow the game up. In reality, it will probably speed the game up as it can be decided quicker by video than it takes the referee to stop being harangued by the team the decision goes against when he makes a mistake or it’s contentious. Fans have been calling for it for years and quite frankly in this day and age, when you’re broadcasting to millions and you make a mistake like that and refuse to do anything about poor decisions as an organisation you look incompetent or possibly corrupt.

    I’m surprised and disappointed that there are only 2 options available and only for goal line technology.

      1. right sometimes what might look like “human randomness” might not be so random after all if you think about match fixing … would guess (real time) video could make such game manipulations harder

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