Tech at the Super Bowl
What a game! Loved it.
I was on a dozen stations this morning talking about the technology in the Super Bowl and there’s a lot to talk about!
The Drones
- The FAA wouldn’t let them fly drones over the stadium, so they recorded it earlier in the week-They are part of a new business for Intel. “Shooting Star” drone air-shows
- They are part of a new business for Intel. “Shooting Star” drone air-shows
- The weight of a volleyball, quadra-copters
- All 300 were controlled by a single operator
Google Home Ad Caused Problems for Its Products
- Google’s Smart-Home automation devices respond to voice command using “OK, Google”
- Google’s Ad contained the phrase “OK, Google” and the devices woke up, confused
- Google’s servers got hit with a swarm of invalid commands
- The Twitter-verse exploded with complaints
- Similar problem with a TV station’s report on Amazon Echo being used to order a doll house by a young girl
Security Was Heavy, With Tech Behind the Scenes
- Every person who entered the stadium was likely subjected to a facial recognition scan. They started doing it 16 years ago.
- They used infra-red camera technology to track people throughout the entire Super Bowl 10-days of festivities.
- Is our Surveillance society expanding?
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Listen to one of this morning’s interview on NH Today:
AS HEARD ON – The NH Today [02-06-17]
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Related articles:
The Super Bowl halftime show drones weren’t flying live
http://craigpeterson.com/news/the-super-bowl-halftime-show-drones-werent-flying-live/11610
Intel unveils a drone made for aerial light shows
http://craigpeterson.com/news/intel-unveils-a-drone-made-for-aerial-light-shows/11613
Google’s Super Bowl ad accidentally set off a lot of Google Homes
http://craigpeterson.com/news/googles-super-bowl-ad-accidentally-set-off-a-lot-of-google-homes/11616
Intel powered the drones during Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show
FOX Sports Has New Tech For Their 100M Super Bowl Viewers
http://craigpeterson.com/news/fox-sports-has-new-tech-for-their-100m-super-bowl-viewers/11622
Get In The Game: Super Bowl Tackles The Technology Wave
http://craigpeterson.com/news/get-in-the-game-super-bowl-tackles-the-technology-wave/11625
Super Bowl LI using security video technology from Fort Collins incubator to help see people at night
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Transcript
TTWCP-DAILY-26_2017-02-06_Superbowl-Tech
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 02/06/2017
Superbowl Tech – Lady Gaga – Pre-recorded Drones – Facial Recognition – Thermal Imaging
Craig Peterson: Regular listeners to my podcast, radio show, and of course, TV appearances know that I live in New England. Well just last night, a great game. The New England Patriots won. Let’s talk not about the Patriots and Tom Brady and the most amazing comeback in NFL history. Let’s talk about the tech. There is tons of tech behind the scenes. Fox, who is the company who carried the game, had 20,000 feet of space there. They had miles of cables . They did some of the things for the very first time ever last night with technology. So we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about the drones. We’ll talk about how they did Lady Gaga. And we’re going to talk about the security technology as well. All NFL today. All Super Bowl. All the tech behind the scenes the made it work that is changing the face of broadcast television. Finally these guys are starting to get it. Stick around. A lot to talk about again today.
(TTWCP EARWORM)
Hey we’re not going to do much of a sanity check today. Today we are going to talk about the technology that was at use at the Super Bowl that we’re going to see showing up in more and more venues. In fact some of that Tech is already being used by our friends down at Disney, at Disney World. So we’re going to talk about that. We’re gonna talk about all of the great things that we didn’t see last night and some cool of the stuff that we did. First of all let’s start with what happened overhead last night. You saw, if you watched the game you saw these drones. About 300 drones. They’re called shooting stars. Intel’s a company that makes these things and it looks like Intel isn’t just making the drones. They’re trying to make a whole new business which makes sense right? And you saw Lady Gaga up there on top of this… of the whatever it was… the stadium. And you saw her singing and behind her came the American flag and all of these cool lights floating around. Well I hate to burst your bubble but that was entirely filmed earlier in the week. Lady Gaga was not up top singing last night and those drones we’re not flying last night either. No, the FAA didn’t let them get close. In fact, nothing was able to fly for more than 30 miles around the stadium. Did you notice in the drone footage there was an airplane passing by right? Well, that was shot earlier in the week because the FAA was concerned. You’ve got fans, how many fans were there? Tens of thousands of fans in the stadium. You have these drones flying overhead. And these drones, of course, are heavy. They weigh a couple of pounds a piece, right? Well they weigh 28 grams, ok? But when you get them flying down at you, you have a few pounds of force of impact when this thing hits. They’re very, very, very cool, ok? They can fly from up to 20 minutes. They have this beautiful light on the bottom of them which gives them the ability to make up to some 4 billion colors and that’s very cool as well.
So the FAA said Hey listen, we don’t want these anywhere near the stadium during the Super Bowl events. So Intel had to oblige and they recorded this earlier in the week. It’s very cool. They’ve been using these for a little while. Last year, really, near the end of the year’s when they started taking off. They’ve been flying them in what are called swarms. That’s kind of the bottom line here. There’s swarms. And they’re, believe it or not, they can be flown by one person. I kind of thought that maybe the drones are being flown by the people who are down on the floor of the stadium but that’s not how it works. They can fly some very complex patterns that are designed, really, to give a little bit of, you know, entertainment. Some awe to all of those people who are in attendance and it certainly did last night. At least on TV because, of course, the people who were in attendance couldn’t see it. Lady Gaga was not on the roof of the stadium last night. That was pre-recorded as well.
So it’s neat. We’re going see more it. If you go to Disney World, you’ll see these things too. They are designed for safety. They do have a cage around those blades. They are quadricopters like we seen so many times and I think it’s just absolutely cool. By the way, there are all kinds of military implications for the use of these things and we’ll have to talk more about military-type drones here in the future.
Now there are a couple other things I want to talk about. Did you watch the ads? Google had an ad for its Google home device. And big problem was a lot of homes already have these Google home devices and what do you think happened when someone on the ad said, ok Google? Yeah indeed all of these devices and every last one of them. There’s ways around this but all of the devices that had their default configurations in the homes perked up and said sorry something went wrong, ok? But if you look on Twitter, there is a whole lot of Google okaying going on with the Super Bowl commercials.
Just so you know, another little thing about tech, if you have one of these. If you have Amazon Echos. If you have the Google Home, check it out. Go into your preferences and change the phrase that wakes it up. Now they only let you have one of a few different predetermined phrases. So if you want to, you can change it from the default of, you know Alexa or OK Google or whatever. But you can’t change it a whole lot. But you might really, really want to change it. We talked before on the show about the young lady who ordered a little Barbie doll thing from one of these Alexas from Amazon. So that’s the next thing.
And the big, big news, I think, last night was the fact that there was no big news excuse me, when it came to terrorism, because there’s so much cool stuff going on. There is a company that put together the technology there from Fort Collins and before Collins incubator started this company. And I’m looking at a picture right now of the whole park. It’s called Discovery Green Park. It’s in Houston. And you can see the stadium here in the background of this picture. It is huge. I can’t believe the massive screens they had set up for advertising there. Absolutely massive. They must be three or four stories high these screens with ABS on them everything else. Not in the stadium. I didn’t know that was going on. But this company EMS technology, was hired by the city of Houston and the US Department of Homeland Security to provide video analytics technology. It tied into these Axis Communications cameras that were all over the place. And also tied in with thermal cameras that Axis provided. So they’ve got something called Eagle Eye Edge. Its software that they provided and they were looking at thermal images. They had computers monitoring them. Keeping an eye in what was going on. The camera set up ran for 10 days. Did you realize that? That this event was 10 days long? It wasn’t just last night’s game. And they were looking for people around the perimeter. People who were hanging around that they didn’t want to have hanging around. People who are trying to sneak in. And they were basically augmenting boots-on-the-ground 24/7 and that’s really kind of cool.
Everybody, and I mentioned this on Jack Heath’s show this morning, everybody who went in that stadium had a background check whether they realized it or not. There are cameras there that have been now for what a decade or more, cameras there that were taking snapshots of everybody’s face that was showing up for the Super Bowl. Everybody. It ran it through the National Crime Information computer looking for criminals, looking for terrorists. I bet you they found a few criminals last night just based on this technology. So there’s more technology that was behind the scenes. You didn’t really see it but they got you. They got your face. They know you attended and they know whether or not you were a bad guy.
And then the last bit of Technology that we have to talk about was Fox. I mention that a little bit earlier but Fox had 70 sports cameras there last night that were just shooting the field. They had high-speed 4K resolution cameras, that’s what I used to record video here in studio and that we post online. They had regular 4K cameras. They had super motion
cameras, 360 frame a second, 480 frame a second cameras. Pylon cameras, very, very neat. 8 different pylons there. They had an 8K camera as well. 91 microphones. They had mics at every camera including the Skycam. They had audio mixing boards, 3 of them. 5.1 surround. They were also streaming. Now that’s how I watch most of the game last night. Fox was streaming. And they had 3D streaming, you could pick your own views. You could watch multiple sports simultaneously, I don’t know why you would during the Super Bowl, but that was really cool technology. They had almost 20,000 square feet worth of temporary structures and space to run all of this equipment. There’s just tons of it.
So what I really like about it is they had sensors in the cameras, they had sensors on the players, they were providing all this information via their livestream. By the way they, every game, they stream about 4 terabytes worth of video was just kind of coo. Well they call it data so I assume it’s video but they weren’t really clear on that. But it was very good. They had something also called Be the Player. Now you would think from watching that video last night that some people must had cameras on their helmets or cameras on their bodies right? Because of this Be the Player technology. You could see the game as though you were the player and I thought that was just so cool. Guess what, nothing. They had no cameras on any of the players there last night. It was all done virtually and using the cameras, these 70 different cameras they had down on the field.
Did you also see the 3D shots were they had, you know, they would freeze something like someone catching a ball or something. And then they pan around and you could see it from every angle. Intel, as I mentioned, did these little drones last night. Well, Intel also provided the technology for that 3D shot as though you know the free shot… look at it from every angle as though they had cameras all around the field which obviously they didn’t. Obviously they didn’t have any camera making that 3D round Rob and 360 shot. That was all done through hardware and software. Very cool. Very good. Smart move Fox. Let’s get more into the hands of the viewers, which they did and also into the cord cutters. I have to say by the way that I think it was during the fourth quarter. Fox stopped streaming, at least to us. I’m assuming they were overloaded. We’ve been watching. It was looking really, really good. So I had to fall back to cable TV. I do have basic, basic cable to get the local news and also to watch like the Super Bowl and the final games. I don’t watch all the games during the season. Not even close. I don’t watch the games until it looks like one of our New England teams is going to win and then I start paying attention. I guess, I guess I’m kind of a fair-weather fan here of our New England teams but it’s very, very cool. Good move. Great move. We’re going to see more of these techs as time goes on.
Have a great day. Tomorrow we’ll have another Daily and you can catch that live on my stream when it gets released. And course that’s going to happen. But you don’t know when, but you’ll get it automatically if you’re subscribe http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Have a great day and we’ll be back tomorrow with another TechSanity Check. Bye.
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