Helmets With Built-In Cameras Coming to College Football
By Chris Brown
An athletics tech company Sports Video Innovations (SVI) recently announced that the NCAA and the NFL will begin adding their SchuttVision cameras onto college and professional football players’ helmets as early as this year. The concept began research and development in 2013 and was officially released at the American Football Coaches Association Convention in 2014.
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The goal of SVI is to revolutionize the way sports are viewed and experienced as well as to learn more about football helmets and player safety. The actual camera is a small device located at the top of the facemask and streams wirelessly to avoid adding extra weight to a player’s head wearing the helmet. You can see several demo videos of the SchuttVision cameras in action here.
It will be interesting to see how teams will use the new cameras in the future. Several football teams have already started implementing the new cameras onto their helmets, including ACC schools Clemson and Miami. We’re unsure when exactly Duke will add them, if they decide to do so, but it would be really cool to see plays like this, this, this, and this, etc., from the player’s perspective on the field.
The NCAA is also hoping to make the cameras available for all football programs, and is currently working on a deal with SVI to use the cameras on helmets in five or six bowl games this postseason, so it’s possible the Blue Devils will be able to experience the helmet cameras this year. The role of the cameras is varied in each football league- being popular in the Arena Football League since 2014, slowly growing in the NFL and NCAA, and only allowed in practices for high school teams but banned in football games.
Technology has grown to play a key role in sports today, and we’re interested to see how Duke and head coach David Cutcliffe will use new tech to continue to improve and build the program. One of Cutcliffe’s former schools Tennessee recently created a virtual reality system using GoPro cameras, Oculus Rift virtual reality glasses, and a computer. Duke has already implemented several new technologies for basketball, using STAT’s SportsVU to analyze the players on the court in an x-y plane and creating an advanced data visualization tool for fans to compare current and past Duke basketball statistics.