Competitive Analysis

True Tennis Live is an interactive tennis court where the court speaks to you! It is able to tell you if the ball you hit stays in or goes out using speakers around the court. This technology is needed on an average tennis player's level because calls are always debated and people are sometimes not loyal to their call.

There are many ideas out there in other sports that acquire similar technology for the same purpose:

          The first example includes soccer and the implementation of goal-line technology to decide what is a goal or not because it sometimes becomes unclear for the official. FIFA plans on putting a chip in the ball and will use a magnetic field to detect when it crosses the goal line. This is different than my idea because I do not use magnets to determine whether or not the ball crosses the line. It however is similar because at first I also want to put a chip in the ball to determine where it is on the court.

          It is obvious that balls become lost the most in the sport of golf. A company called RadarGolf incorporates technology into their golf balls. They do this by installing an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chip into the ball and whenever a ball goes either out of sight of the player there is no fear. All the searcher has to do is take out a RadarGolf handheld device and point it into any direction which will allow it to beep when it crosses over where your ball is. It will keep beeping until you reach the ball. This idea actually gave me the thought that I could possibly use an RFID chip in my tennis ball and lasers will be set up on the lines of the court and when the ball passes the laser it will beep telling the player the ball is out.

         There is many other competition within the same ideas in sports for tracking where the balls are. This has always been a misconception because of human error and that is why we need machines to help us solve these problems. I am glad I did this competitive analysis because it opened my eyes to see who else is out in the industry and what types of technologies they are using.

Lecture Post: Hardware

True Tennis Live is a type of electronic tennis court that tells the players if a ball lands in or out of the boundary lines. This type of technology is needed for all average level tennis players when they are competing because it is always debatable where the ball lands.

A recent topic that we discussed in IST 195 was hardware and all of their functions in the computer. Computer hardware is all of the physical components and guts on the inside. Technology has changed rapidly over many decades. Back in the day a 100 megabyte drive used to be around $3,500. However, today we can get a 3 terabyte drive for as little as $150. That is more than 20 million bytes for a lot less money!

The system unit contains various pieces of hardware that are necessary for the computer to work and run properly. Of course when building a computer, it depends on the user on how much they want to spend on certain products. The main components required include: a motherboard, drive bay, processor, memory, power supply, sound/video card, and RAM. There are many other accessories needed to run a computer but this depends on how skilled the user is and how much they want to get out of the machine.

When a tyro is looking at the inside of a computer everything looks to be really scary and overwhelming. But it is actually possible to build your own computer from scratch. This could become a time consuming process for some, but for experts it can be done in a couple hours. However, when in the process, the builder must be very careful to have nothing connected to any source of power giving it electricity because there is a high possibility of getting shocked. Only when every component is hooked up correctly and you are sure it will start up right should the builder turn it on. This lecture gave me a lot of insight on hardware and actually taught me certain details of the computer I have never heard of. I realized from this lecture that I would need a good a graphics card for the computers on the tennis courts so that they run properly and are efficient for the user.

Entrepreneurship Post

Have you ever played tennis with a friend and called a debatable ball out/in but couldn't really tell exactly where it landed? I have and am sure probably not the only one who has had this dilemma. Tennis is known as a game of honor and being respectful during a match is key to not get your opponent angry from a blown call. A result of this could be a possibility of never playing with this friend again; no one wants that. I introduce "True Tennis Live," an interactive tennis court that will tell the players whether or not the ball is out or in.

The concept is simple: equip every line on the court with sensors and have the balls installed with GPS chips so that they know where on the court they are at all times. Next, we will code to the computer whenever the ball lands inside the competitors court is in play and of course anything beyond the lines is out. These courts will also be furnished with speakers on all sides so that when a ball lands out, the players will hear nice and loud "OUT!" from a choice of either a man or lady's voice. Each time the ball lands in, there will be no call for "IN" because that would get repetitive and annoying, rather over the speakers a short low beep will be played.

Players of the games will also be able to sign in and keep track of their scores. From the computer, players will see on a screen a virtual presentation of past or current games. This display will show where each ball landed and show the score on the top of the screen so that they don't lose track of who is winning. The point of this is to prove the "truth" of whether or not the ball did go in or not. This technology is already used on a professional level in tournaments like the US Open, but once we scale it down onto an average player's ability level the sport of tennis will become more popular and respected everywhere.