It Is Called Hawk-Eye, Tennis’s Moviola.

The history of Tennis at the competitive level has been characterized by numerous episodes of great controversy caused by rather obvious arbitral oversights or by the burning conviction (wrong) of a player that the ball had fallen at that particular point on the tennis court. Tennis can be considered one of the first sports to have adopted the "moviola on the field" through the technology called Hawk-Eye, with functions of "virtual line judge" in major international tournaments.

The Hawk-Eye is a moviola system that consists of the reproduction of the trajectory of the ball and the path that has statistically followed. Engineers developed it at Roke Manor Research Limited in Romsey, England, in 2001. At the end of the 2005 season, the ITF tested the Hawk-Eye system in New York City, and after checking eighty types of shots measured by the ITF high-speed camera, it was approved for professional use.

Based on statistics, 30 times out of 100, the decision of the "human" judge is corrected by the virtual one. However, this should not surprise us so much if we think that in Tennis, the speed of the ball can exceed 200 km/ h today. This also explains why the average replay of TV is not enough: at these speeds, and with television footage that captures 25 images per second. Between one frame and the other, the ball moves more than 2 meters, and it is doubtful to be able to catch the moment when it hits the field. This is a feat that instead is in the possibilities of the Hawk-Eye, in particular in the version developed for Tennis, which uses cameras even as "fast" as those of football - 1,000 frames per second instead of 500 and can calculate the position of the ball with a very low margin of error.

His debut was at the 2006 Hopman Cup. The same year, the US Open Tennis Championship announced that each player would be entitled to two tests per set. In 2007, Wimbledon also introduced Hawkeye on Centre Court and Field 1, giving each player three challenges per part. The introduction in the ATP and WTA circuits, after the trial at the Next Gen ATP Finals, took place in August 2020 for several reasons: limiting the presence of people on the courts and interactions in compliance with the anti-Covid-19 protocols, in addition to optimizing expenses (the payment of line judges at such high levels exceeds the cost of installing all instruments). The use of Hawk-Eye live is becoming increasingly popular. The USTA, along with ATP and WTA, have extended this type of technology, used on all fields of the US Open and in seven of the nine tournaments of the US Open Series (those preceding the Flushing Meadows Slam). At the 2021 Australian Open, this solution was used for the first time in any competitive match.

 

Inside Hawkeye, Australian Open TV.

Roland Garros is currently the only slam in which technology is not used. In general, red clay has a problematic relationship with innovation. It is mainly because the human eye is considered more reliable, as the ball leaves a clearly visible mark on the playing field. It should be remembered that the Hawk-Eye is based not on the natural rebound but on an estimate derived from the crossing of data coming from the various cameras placed in the field. The average margin of error, I remember, is about 3 millimeters. It is probably considered too many. Nevertheless, there are some news that I will tell you about in the next post.

Goodbye!

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