RFID in football & superbowl

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Posted at 2009/02/01/1410 by fumf
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I’m still on this kick about RFID and their use in sports. I was digging around hoping to find some info on if they are using RFID in today’s superbowl. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much info about this superbowl, however I did find this interesting tidbit from two years ago:

RTFA: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_200…

Bexel Uses System to Track Video Equipment At CBS Sports Set-up for Super Bowl XLI

NEW YORK — The Sports Video Group (SVG), an association of broadcasters, team owners, sports leagues, equipment providers and other sports technology providers, and OATSystems today announced that SVG deployed OATSystems’ OAT Foundation Suite for a radio-frequency identification (RFID) pilot study designed to track video production equipment at Super Bowl XLI.

“A Super Bowl game is arguably one of the most complex U.S. sporting events broadcast each year,” said Martin Porter, SVG executive director. “It requires an enormous effort to coordinate, especially in tracking and managing the many loose pieces of highly advanced and sophisticated video production equipment necessary to produce and televise the event.”

Porter added, “SVG’s membership has urged us to explore the usage of RFID auto identification technology to track the rental equipment that is delivered on site at these large live events. We have learned a tremendous amount about how this process needs to be employed over the coming years as a result of the study we conducted with Bexel and OATSystems’ support at Super Bowl XLI

It makes sense to track equipment but I was hoping for info about using RFID in the football game itself. Another article I found was about tracking the customer tickets with RFID.

Other sports employing RFID in some manner include golf and soccer. The recent FIFA World Cup soccer event in Germany held one of the largest trials of RFID, tagging approximately 5 million admittance tickets.

from http://www.rfidgazette.org/2006/07/another_sport_t.html

That article also states that NASCAR is using RFID on the tires themselves to help combat cheating. Now that’s more what I’m interested in. It seems RFID is not yet being used in the sports themselves much, but I’d bet heavy that it will in the future!

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  • farkinga
    This is an interesting meme.

    For what it's worth, RFID excels in the following use case: short-range reader, unique item significance (e.g. no duplicates, SQL primary key, etc). I've heard about self-powered RFID that can be read at a distance, and maybe that would be interesting for tracking players on the field or something... I don't think RFID is particularly well-suited for determining positioning, but I can imagine how it could be hacked to provide x,y coordinates (perhaps by using an array of highly directional antennas). Thing is, some other proprietary tracking tech might work better in this situation.

    ...it seems like the unique tickets of admission are a perfect application. Same with the video equipment. I could imagine gimmicks, like tagging water bottles and tracking how many of certain flavors were consumed... advertising, in other words. Or, in a freaky big brother sense, if there were readers all over the stadium, and peoples' tickets were pinged constantly... it would be cool to plot the flow of people over time.

    I seem to recall a recent hacker conference (25c3 or defcon) where all of the badges included an RFID chip, and they had readers anywhere. The trick is that all of the data was available to everyone, and the point was to figure out cool/scary things to do with it. I forget how it turned out, but I might have seen a video of the results. If I can find it, I'll post it.
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