Of Bats and Stumps

How would it feel to be a stump and see a speeding ball come straight onto your face? TV has left nothing to imagination, thanks to stump cameras. These are micro-cameras placed inside the stumps, giving couch potatoes the experience of being where no spectator on the cricket field can ever imagine being. In many cricket fields, there’s a wire traveling underground, connecting the camera to other TV equipment or even PCs, to remotely control them. Many international cricket grounds have this facility. Cordless cameras with radio or microwave transmission are also used. 

Wired transmission is preffered over wireless transmission because the players tend to come in the way in the case of the latter. The first stump camera installation was done by the BBC the early 1990s. They placed a Hitachi KP-D8s camera in the middle stump. This was a color camera that used a 410,000 pixel CCD with micro lenses, and offered a horizontal resolution of 470 TV lines. The size of the camera , 42 cubic cm (80 gms) makes it possible for it to be inserted into the stumps. If one camera is not enough, then two can be placed, one with a wide-angle lens and the other with a narrow-angle lens, giving the TV broadcaster four different views to choose from. 

These Hitachi cameras can connect to PCs over a RS232C link (serial port), and can then be remotely controlled using a software application specifically written for them .

The protocol is also available on request to write custom applications. The Hitachi KP-D8s camera, for instance, uses a special program written in Microsoft VC++ 5.0 for controlling it. The software works on Win95/NT machines, and lets you control several parameters like white balance and picture control. You can even control its electric shutter speed from it. 

So, where will the technology go from the stump? With virtually each spot on the field being covered by one camera or the other, any new camera angle can just be a value add and nothing else. There have been suggestions of using an umpire cam or a batsman cam (to be fitted in the helmet). The implementation is more of an economic or a policy issue rather than a technological hindrance.

You would be forgiven for thinking that technology has been put into place only for cricketers and that too on the greens. Nothing could be farther from truth at South Africa 2003. On the field or off it, in the stadium or in your living room, you can’t escape IT anymore. Interesting is the crowd-control mechanism in operation in South Africa. For the first time manual ticketing has been replaced by automated ones.  The main companies involved in developing this are Dimension Data and Choice Technologies. Dimension developed the back-office operations software as well as the POS (point of sale) interfaces. Allowing the fans to enter the stadium is the job of the intelligent turnstiles made by Turnstar. Based on a 386 processor with 8 MB memory, these turnstiles act as intelligent doorkeepers keeping track of and allowing people to enter and leave the stadium. The turnstiles can scan the barcodes on the tickets and keep updating a central database over a LAN. If at any point, should the LAN connectivity fail, the turnstiles can connect peer-to-peer.

Better Bat



Stumps aren’t the only thing. The better batter, or the betta batta’ to some, will also be a major weapon in training future generations of cricketers, particularly for South Africa. 

The betta batta’ is a normal willow bat whose blade has been covered with 48 pressure sensors. These sensors can assess the point of impact of the ball on bat, and send the information to a computer. Special software on the computer can analyze the data and present it pictorially on a computer screen. But the fact that betta batta’ is hotwired to a computer also restricts the batsman’s movement and its use outside a lab. But, now its successor, the Generation 2 bat, promises to transmit the information to the computer wirelessly.

Designed by Dr Richard Stretch from the University of Port Elizabeth, and built by Professor Gerald Nurich from the University of Cape Town, the betta batta’ could well become a cricket coach’s dream weapon in training batsmen to focus on the ball better and hit it straight out of the stadium with the ‘sweet zone of the bat.’ 

The sweet zone the bat from where maximum striking force is generated to hit the ball. As of now it is only at the prototype stage and it will be some time before we see the effects of cricketers who have trained with one.

Geetaj Channana and Benoy George Thomas