A Blog Around The Clock

We have a lot of faith that the sensors on the wall are accurate because of the precision they ultimately will need to address, as has been the case in numerous races this year. I'm fascinated at how that technology must work, though I've never looked into it before.

However, my real fascination is video, and the exposure as to how relatively slow 30 frames per second is. Despite the implied conclusion of Phelps fingers on the wall, no video showed an obvious "who touched first" winner in the race.

A few years ago I was investigating cameras that shot thousands of frames per second, mainly used in safety and "crash test" type of environments to document exactly when a structure / mechanism / product would fail. If I recall exactly, the example was on NASCAR equipment, testing the automobile equipment's resistance or failure upon impact. Cameras that could produce images at 10,000 frames per second were used to pinpoint structural defects.

I wonder if something as fleshy as a finger touching a wall would be visible to such an image. Or, how detailed would a picture need to be to capture a nose (nose hair?) crossing a finish line. Or as Torres said joking, but maybe not Really joking, a filed fingernail could make all the difference in a race.

It would be a great video review tool, although I could see such a camera slowing down the judging process a bit...the NHL video review process might look like a model of efficiency in comparison to scanning through thousands of frames of video to spot a winner.

For the record, I really like Phelps and glad he won, feeble 20th century 1/30 per second image or not.

Posted by: Fertanish | August 18, 2008 1:15 PM