Only A "Fox" Could Scare "Hawk-Eye." The Rise Of Foxtenn.

After the adoption of the Hawk-Eye, as anticipated in my previous post linked to this innovative system, the world of tennis has not stopped; in the meantime, continuing to work and evaluate further technological innovations. 

In fact, in 2017, Foxtenn Begreen created a new and more reliable control system for tennis that is no longer based on the estimate of the ball's bounce (which moves from the projections of the trajectory) but on its natural bounce called "Real Bounce Technology." Moreover, with an installation cost of less than the $ 50,000 required for the Hawk-Eye.

In the context of red clay, what this new technology tries to solve is the problem of the ball mark: it can, in fact, happen that, due to the lifting of the earth caused by the rebound, a ball just outside is called in because there is no space between mark and line or vice versa.

The Foxtenn uses a considerable number of very high-speed cameras synchronized with each other and combined with a high-speed laser scanner system, which captures everything that happens in the field from any angle. Some data on the comparison between the two systems: the Hawk-Eye uses only ten cameras, each of which can capture 150 frames per second, while the Real Bounce Technology, the only certified for clay court tournaments, has 40 cameras, each capable of filming 2500 frames per second. Everything is then processed in such a way that the public can see with their own eyes no longer a graphic reconstruction of the probable point of impact but the exact point where the ball actually hit the ground, which allows the computer to ascertain whether the bounce took place on or off the court clay.

Real Bounce Technology, renamed "fox eye," was first introduced during the 2017 edition of the tournament on the fast ATP 250 in Metz and then made its official debut on clay, not European, but American, in the 2021 WTA Charleston tournament. Among the 1000 Masters, this new system has so far only been used in Madrid in both the 2021 and this year's editions, while in 2022, we have also seen it at work in the ATP 500 in Barcelona.

A little secret for you: to understand if this new technology is used in a tournament or not, take a careful look at the network and see if two gray parallelepipeds are positioned in correspondence with the sidelines (inside which some cameras are placed). If so, Real Bounce Technology is active.

So, if it is so precise and reliable, why don't we see it in all clay tournaments, especially the most famous, namely Roland Garros? According to various commentators, the answer has exclusively economic reasons: it would be costly to install a system of 40 cameras (which are managed by ten computers for each field) at very high speed on the 20 fields in which the Parisian grand slam is played: in total, they would be necessary 800 cameras managed by 200 computers.

For the moment, therefore, in Paris, it is more convenient to rely on the visual control of the chair judges and line judges in the hope that their work will not be replaced entirely by an artificial intelligence, which in my opinion, must represent, support for match officials, not a way to replace them. Please leave a little more tradition in this wonderful sport.

At least, that is my opinion. What do you think about it?

See you soon!

Do you want to learn more?

Click here:

http://www.foxtenn.com/in&out