Disc golf and woods, woods and disc golf. They were meant for each other. One such location where you can find an abundance of both of these things is Finland. They have seen a steady rise in course implementation, PDGA events, and PDGA membership since the early 2000s. Their numbers are so high that they currently hold the record for the most disc golf courses per capita. They have over 800 courses for nearly 5.5 million people (that’s one course for every 6,875 people). They also have more disc golf courses than ball golf.
Here is a TED talk on how the sport helped the country during the pandemic
In 2015, McKinsey acquired QuantumBlack, a London-based data analytics and AI specialist which had established its reputation working with F1 teams. “The New Zealand team wanted an AI that could do dynamic manoeuvres in highly variable environments, but didn’t think this was possible,” says QuantumBlack’s Nic Hohn. “Reinforcement learning really works when you’ve tried everything else.”
The McKinsey team worked with the New Zealand team for ten months during 2019 and 2020. The bots got so good that the human sailors would watch the simulations and pick up tips. “The bot was actually doing things that felt counterintuitive to the sailors,” says Jacomo Corbo, QuantumBlack’s co-founder and chief scientist, “but they’d try them out on the water and they’d actually work.”
With many people still working from home, athleisure has gained further ground, reflecting new attitudes toward traditional workwear. Increased health awareness has given many people a new perspective on sports and general fitness. E-commerce has thrived, as consumers continue to shop online, even as lockdown measures have eased. Digital forms of individual or community-based exercise and physical activity have become more popular and have created new possibilities for sporting-goods companies. Meanwhile, sustainability is more important than ever, with the COP26 Climate Change Conference emphasizing the need for companies to increase their efforts to decarbonize as they seek to differentiate their offerings.
As the iconic Daytona 500 kicks off today, good to see NASCAR continue to innovate
"The Next Gen car, a collaboration of the brightest engineering minds in racing and the automotive industry, is designed to give the drivers greater control. It will put an emphasis back on race strategies, team personnel and vehicle setups while returning the ‘stock car’ look to NASCAR with the new Toyota TRD Camrys, Chevrolet Camaro ZL1s and Ford Mustangs. The cars, which were designed to look like the models available to fans in showrooms across the country, will utilize the latest technology to maximize performance, improve safety and provide incredible racing for fans."
Players stand inside a giant tent, and footballs are fired at them under different light conditions and at different speeds to help sharpen their response times. The changing light levels manipulate how fast the ball appears to be moving, making it more difficult for the visual system and brain to process a ball’s movement, pushing the delay in processing from 200 milliseconds to 250. That adds a further two metres of “blindness” to any decision an athlete makes.
Initially, that means a lot of getting hit in the head and body by wayward balls you’re unable to react to. Hladký, in his first trials with OKKULO, ended up catching some shots from OKKULO’s ball cannon with his neck. But the body adapts and recognizes it needs to take decisive action earlier. “You're constantly recalibrating your brain to interact with your environment,” says Stockman. The process becomes rewired to the low light levels—which means when you’re back in normal light, time seems to slow down and your brain makes more measured decisions about where a ball’s likely to go. “We make them see six feet better off,” says Mel O’Connor, founder of OKKULO.
The venue for Super Bowl 56 is SoFi Stadium which opened last year in Inglewood, CA, close to LAX airport.
The design firm, HKS explains the design principles behind the $5 billion arena.
“SoFi Stadium’s architecture is informed by extensive research into Southern California’s industry, architecture, lifestyle, climate, geography, and landscape, combining to create an authentic Southern California expression and experience. The sweeping coastline and the beauty and strength of the Pacific Ocean contribute to the clean and dramatic curves of the stadium’s unmistakable architecture that reflects the region’s indoor-outdoor lifestyle. The stadium’s translucent roof, seating bowl, concourses and landscape were sculpted and designed to create the feel of an outdoor venue while providing the flexibility of a traditional domed stadium.
The FAA’s height restrictions, one of the project’s initial design challenges, became one of the most prominent features within the overall project: the seating bowl sits 100-feet below the existing grade – about two to three times the depth of other similar multiuse venues. To create a memorable procession experience for patrons navigating their way down to their seats and concourses, HKS demurred from the typical series of elevators, escalators, stairs and ramps, and created an indoor/outdoor meandering series of paths that guide fans through visually rich landscaped environments replete with amenities along the way.
The open-air SoFi Stadium is the first indoor-outdoor stadium to be constructed and the NFL’s largest at 3.1 million square feet (288,500 square meters). Situated under one monumental roof canopy, three state-of-the-art venues – the 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, the 2.5-acre covered outdoor American Airlines Plaza and a 6,000-seat performance venue – can simultaneously host different events.
The stadium’s single layer ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) roof provides a guarantee, rain or shine, for the multitude of events hosted by SoFi, all while maintaining connectivity to the outdoors and flooding the venue with natural light. The ETFE film features a 65% frit pattern that shelters guests from direct sun and reduces solar gain into the venue. The roof also features a series of operable panels distributed around the perimeter of the ETFE that can open and close, depending on the climatic conditions to promote airflow in the stadium and a comfortable environment for fans.”
Here is a tour of many of the tech and other features
As Mary J Blige says "Don't need no hateration holleration"
Instead, we will experience a relentless flood of innovative technologies at the Big Game this Sunday.
The Stadium
“The 3.1 million-square-foot behemoth in Inglewood is a state-of-the-art technological marvel, featuring a 70,000-square-foot video board (dubbed the “Infinity Screen”), lightning-fast Wi-Fi and a massive LED canopy. SoFi Stadium relies solely on digital displays for everything from advertising to concession stand menus; that also comes in handy since the arena has two NFL tenants, the Rams and the Chargers, and can easily rotate their branding according to who’s playing that day.
With a whopping $5.5 billion price tag, the stadium’s top brass has visions that go far beyond the Super Bowl. The facility is also a concert venue that will host the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bad Bunny this year, and it will play a feature role in the 2028 Summer Olympics in L.A.”
The video tour below provides more of a perspective
The Broadcast
“Few live sports broadcasts compare with the NFL’s season finale when it comes to total cameras and equipment. However, (NBC’s) Gaudelli emphasizes that additional camera angles will be focused on capturing key situational moments rather than adding more cameras for the sake of adding more cameras. So the bulk of the additions for Super Bowl LVI will be goal-line cameras, cameras shooting down the sidelines, and camera shooting down the end-line in the end zone.
NBC will also debut a new graphics package for the game, upping the ante on AR and virtual elements in the broadcast. For the first time, NBC will have virtual graphics available via a Steadicam on the field and also plans to use SoFi Stadium’s Infinity Screen LED halo scoreboard above the field as a graphic display for some of the virtual graphics in the broadcast.”
“VR and AR experiences have been available for the Super Bowl for a few years now, with FOX Sports broadcasting Super Bowl LI Highlights in near real-time in 2017. Five years later, VR and AR have immensely progressed, with the entire game being able to be streamed in VR on apps like Bigscreen. Bigscreen is a VR app designed to let you watch content with friends in the metaverse.
The NFL has also partnered with Meta to allow fans to decorate their online 3D avatars with virtual NFL merchandise. According to officials from Meta, these 3D, customizable avatars show that the metaverse represents VR and AR, but also more familiar digital platforms like your phone and computer. Small changes like a 3D avatar across all platforms could be a key entry point for people stepping into the metaverse.
In another step in modernizing the Super Bowl, the NFL is offering each attendee of Super Bowl LVI a personalized non-fungible token (NFT) ticket that is customized with their seat number. As of now, the Super Bowl NFTs will be considered collectors’ items. The NFL could also use the ticket NFTs for future experiences and activations.”
Games this season have already been able to take advantage of ML driven recommendations and hopefully the Super Bowl will be close enough to require early and often the Next Gen Stats Decision Guide which “is built on a series of machine-learning models using the Amazon SageMaker platform powering live fourth-down and two-point-conversion decision analytics. For every crucial decision, Next Gen Stats breaks down the numbers in real time. To create a quantitative tool that can aid in live decision support, we first have to break down the driving factors of the decision: win probability (the impact of each decision on the game) and conversion probability (the likelihood of success with each decision).”
Security will be massive as the video below describes
The Ventilation
The stadium’s passive ventilation and daylighting strategies — both defining features of its indoor/outdoor atmosphere — capitalize on the sun’s position and ocean winds throughout the day, resulting in a series of small microclimates on the site that informed landscape planning.
This may be a challenge with temperatures expected to be in the 80s. While the stadium has natural ventilation with its roof with open sides, the temperature inside will likely be higher in a packed stadium
The Half-time show
The acoustics, the lighting and fireworks will be electric – here is a preview
The Commercials
Now for the best part of the game. The price for a 30 second spot is nearly $7 million, yet NBC is sold out of inventory. Lots of technology vendors will be represented.
In fact, it is being called the Crypto Bowl, because as at least 5 of those startups will be featured in Super Bowl commercials. But you also have enterprise vendors like Salesforce with this
My early favorite for best commercial from the Game involves robots. Ok, it also involves beer :)
The whole place should be rocking with Mary J
"Let's get it crunk up on Have fun up on, up in this dancery...."
In keeping with China’s status as a global leader in technological innovation, the opening ceremony made up for its relatively low number of participants with an extraordinary spectacle created by an array of lasers, lights, enormous LED screens, and pyrotechnics. Despite the use of plenty of cutting-edge technology, however, the ceremony’s imagery was largely inspired by the natural world, with the narrative centered around the beginning of spring and featuring recreations of a variety of Chinese flora and fauna, including willow trees and butterflies. The most spectacular moment? The light sticks paraded by dancers that unfolded to create dandelions, before fireworks exploded above to represent the seeds of the flower spreading across the earth.
While director Zhang Yimou may be best known for the kaleidoscopic cinematography, lavish costuming, and eye-popping sets of his wuxia martial-arts epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, the three-time Oscar-nominated director’s themes of resilience and national pride made him the obvious choice to direct the opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, widely remembered as one of the most dazzling of all time. So it followed that he was enlisted to direct this year’s proceedings too—and he once again realized his distinctive vision with the ravishing visual splendor that has become his signature.
Here is a summary of some of the tech used for the ceremony
But the 2022 Games will take it one step further: None of the snow will be real. At both the alpine skiing venue in Yanqing, a mountainous Beijing suburb, and at the biathlon, cross-country, freestyle, nordic, ski jumping and snowboarding venues in Zhangjiakou, a ski destination 100 miles northwest of the host city, the temperatures regularly dip below freezing, but natural monthly snowfall is best measured in centimeters. “The Olympics cannot rely on that,” says Michael Mayr. “So they have to be sure the snow is there when they start.”
Here the onus falls to TechnoAlpin, an Italian snowmaking supplier for whom Mayr, 46, works as an area sales manager overseeing China. To hear him describe the vast amount of equipment necessary to stage these Olympics, TechnoAlpin might as well be outfitting an arctic army for battle. At the Yanqing venue alone, 170 fan-powered guns and 30 fanless stick lances work around the clock spraying water mist—sourced from a nearby reservoir and pressurized through multiple “pump stations”—that crystallizes into snow on its descent through the chilly air.
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