Tracking Kicks, Shots And Sprints With Your iPhone
Resharing another old post I did on sportstechnologyblog.com about the iPhone’s camera vision and ARKit capabilities (original link). Although this was written back in 2018, I believe this technology is only starting to become more widely used in the last year or so; and especially with the newer devices that come with even more powerful hardware (cameras, processors and SDKs).
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The iPhone is a pretty impressive piece of equipment as we mentioned in an earlier post about IMUs(inertial measurement units) and how it can potentially be used to track sports movements. However, few people would want to strap their expensive iPhone on themselves while playing basketball or soccer, especially if it has a plus-sized screen.
Computer Vision
On the other hand, apart from the in-built IMUs, the iPhone has a set of components that allow it to track motion without needing it strapped onto the athlete. The components/features we are talking about here are the camera sensors, its powerful processor, the iOS Vision framework (supported by the Core machine learning framework) and the Augmented Reality Kit (ARKit). Basically, stuff that was released since iOS 11.
