It’s that time of the year again. When the lawns of the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) are being carefully tendered to, and the Pimms bought in bulk in preparation for one of the U.K.’s biggest sporting events: The Wimbledon Championships.
As it has in the last 30 or so years, the AELTC teamed with U.S. tech giant IBM this week to bring some forms of fresh innovation to the championships, differentiating the iconic traditional tennis tournament from others across the world.
In past years, the sports/tech partnership has seen the rollout of various updates including AI and cloud innovations to make experiences more insightful, ensure The Championships are more efficient and run safely and securely for its critical three-week period. One of the main ones here is the integration of IBM’s intellectual bot, Watson, to bring some pretty impressive tech onboard. For instance: automated video highlights to fans watching from home; a new AI bot for the Wimbledon app so users can ask any Wimbledon related questions answered in one place; and a new real-time insight which highlights matches of particular interest and quality.
This year, to freshen things up, IBM made big data a big focus and introduced a host of new systems to the Wimbledon bunker. This includes an enhanced AI-powered automated video highlights for Wimbledon fans.
“Not all highlights during a tennis match are equal for example, a highly passionate crowd favorite could generate more excitement than a more reserved yet equally skilled opponent,” explains IBM in a release about the ongoing partnership. “As a learning system, Watson has been taught to better recognize acoustics and understand inadvertent bias increasing the quality of the output.”
With sound analysis from Watson Acoustics, this means the system can now recognize when the ball has been struck allowing tighter cropping of highlight clips saving vital time and maximizing every second of rights footage.
“Using Watson Open Scale, the system can now also recognize levels of noise and excitement levels of players allowing it to remove bias when searching for highlights from players with a particularly vocal following or those who are particularly animated on court,” IBM adds.
IBM and Wimbledon have also worked together this year to create a progressive web app, which is said to provide a service for audiences in territories with lower bandwidth and less developed mobile hardware.
“Acknowledging that over 900 million fans in India for example, express an interest in Wimbledon, the new progressive web app is designed to provide a lightweight experience to ensure that fans in those territories can make sure they don’t miss out on the latest scores and results,” says IBM.
IBM works with the AELTC to deliver everything from design capability (via IBM iX), to building and integrating the latest systems and applications. A big part of this is in security. For example, during the 2018 Championships IBM detected and blocked over 200 million suspicious cybersecurity events. This year, IBM says it has over 200 of its people dedicated to helping Wimbledon, in the same way, to ensure gameplay runs as smoothly as possible.
However, IBM isn't the only tech company working to improve experiences at Wimbledon with new innovations. Chinese smartphone giant, Oppo, has become the first company ever to provide technology so that Wimbledon can be professionally captured on a smartphone, namely, the OPPO Reno 5G.
The deal sees official Wimbledon Photographer, Jed Leicester, undertake a new challenge of delivering the tournament using the Reno 5G’s 10x hybrid tech, from wide-angle to 10x close-up zoom. The idea is to "bring the tournament to life through a new lens", in this case, a smartphone one, to show off how mobile camera innovation has advanced in recent years.
