Improving on Baseball's Best Single Camera Motion Capture
Every other week I write an email discussing what I learn launching and growing Reboot Motion. If you would like to receive it directly in your inbox, subscribe below.
Reboot Motion’s core product is motion capture processing at scale.
But the core value we provide is enabling pro organizations to excel in biomechanics at scale.
Therefore, if our partners face a pain when it comes to movement analysis, we need to help solve it.
And, with the rise of in-game markerless motion capture, one problem we’ve heard time and time again is teams don’t have the same x-ray vision they’re used to in the game, outside of it.
While Reboot Motion is not a motion capture company, the ability to process raw video is a key part in our mission of enabling pro organizations to excel in biomechanics at scale.
It is why we released our initial single camera motion capture model last offseason, and it is why we went even further to improve it today.
Single Camera Model Version 2.0
While our single camera model should not replace complex markerless set ups, we need to strive to be as close as possible when those systems are not an option.
And that is exactly what we accomplished in the updated model.
While Reboot’s original single camera model had an overall correlation of .92 with that state of the multi camera system it was tested against, our single camera mocap v2.0 saw overall improved correlations, with specific improvements in the following areas:
Right shoulder flexion: +10%
Right shoulder abduction: +2%
Right knee flexion: +13%
Torso rotation: +11%
More details on our new single camera model can be found in the white paper below.
Bat Tracking
On top of the improvements above, we made a sizable leap forward when it comes to hitting.
While we have supported both pitching and hitting for a while, our messaging has been pitching focused, as that has been the bigger pain point coming from our partners.
Recently, that changed- with clubs continually asking us about bat tracking.
Teams are used to tracking the bat in-game, and rightfully demand to have that ability everywhere.
Now they do.
For the first time, all our partners have to do is send us video.
And we can:
Trace the bat
Project the bat into three dimensions and combine with pose data
And get back actionable metrics like peak bat speed (60.3 mph) and attack angle at impact (18.6 degrees).
Moving Forward
Different teams have different needs- and this is true due to variability in teams, the league, and the sport itself.
Regardless, the best results come when those in the arena- analysts, coaches, biomechanists, and more- are equipped with the best tools possible to innovate.
Consider Reboot’s Single Camera Motion Capture 2.0, now with bat tracking, another tool in an organization’s innovation toolkit.