{"id":14887,"date":"2026-06-24T07:46:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T07:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=14887"},"modified":"2026-06-24T07:46:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T07:46:27","slug":"heads-in-the-game-mit-technology-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=14887","title":{"rendered":"Heads in the game | MIT Technology Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The MIT Sports Lab\u2019s origin story begins around 2010, when Anette \u201cPeko\u201d Hosoi, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering, fell in love with downhill mountain biking and needed a new bike. But given the varying linkage systems, shock types, and geometries, she found it difficult to choose the best one. Encountering only minimal information online, she assigned the analysis to her 2.001 class, the introductory course on mechanics. \u201cAll of my exams that semester were bike questions,\u201d she says. They proved to be really good engineering questions too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Having recently earned tenure, she wondered, What if I actually built this sports thing into something bigger?<\/em> In 2011, she began conceptualizing a project called STE@M (Sports Technology and Education at MIT), which would assemble students, faculty, athletes, and industry partners to tackle sports engineering challenges. As the effort kicked into gear over the next few years, Hosoi began collaborating with Christina Chase, MIT\u2019s new entrepreneur in residence, and in 2015 the two of them cofounded the MIT Sports Lab.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Anette
Mechanical engineering professor Anette \u201cPeko\u201d Hosoi assigned bike engineering challenges to her students when she needed a better mountain bike. In 2015, she cofounded the MIT Sports Lab with entrepreneur and MechE lecturer Christina Chase.<\/figcaption>

COURTESY OF MIT MECHANICAL ENGINEERING<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

\u201cIt turned out that we\u2019re the perfect combination for this because my background comes from the math, physics, engineering side,\u201d says Hosoi. \u201cAnd she comes from the entrepreneurship [and] product development side. To really interface with these different sports companies and leagues, you need to span that whole spectrum.\u201d Chase became the lab\u2019s managing director and Hosoi its faculty director.<\/p>\n

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For over a decade, the Sports Lab has grown as interest in sports tech has skyrocketed\u2014and it\u2019s accumulated what younger fans would call some elite ball knowledge in the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This depth is exactly what its partners need.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s more and more data that\u2019s getting collected,\u201d says Hosoi. \u201cA lot of the teams, leagues, brands don\u2019t necessarily have the in-house manpower to extract the information they need. So that\u2019s where we can give them a boost.\u201d<\/p>\n

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When MIT researchers looked at early skeletal data representing soccer players in motion, they saw \u201cskeletons\u201d flying above the ground or completely underground, in anatomically impossible positions.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The FIFA partnership has been especially fruitful\u2014and the Sports Lab\u2019s role in validating SAOT has probably had more impact than any other project the organizations have worked on together, says Ferran Vidal-Codina, SM \u201913, PhD \u201917, a former research scientist at the lab\u00a0who was part of the team from FIFA, MIT, and third-party data providers that developed the technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The system\u2019s viability depended on the ability to quickly access and analyze what\u2019s known as tracking data\u2014the record of everywhere the players and the ball move throughout a game. \u00a0<\/p>\n

To collect that information at top-level FIFA tournaments, data providers station about 12 state-of-the-art cameras around the stadium, capturing images at double or more the speed of normal broadcasting cameras. Computer vision algorithms then convert the feeds into what\u2019s called skeletal data\u20143D representations of the players in motion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a ton of data\u201422 players, one referee, two assistant referees, [each with] 29 joints with XYZ coordinates, 50 times per second,\u201d says Henry Wang \u201923, a former MIT varsity swimmer who earned undergrad degrees in both business analytics and computer science, economics, and data science and is now a Sloan PhD candidate and a FIFA research consultant at the MIT Sports Lab.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

#Heads #game #MIT #Technology #Review<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The MIT Sports Lab\u2019s origin story begins around 2010, when Anette \u201cPeko\u201d Hosoi, the Pappalardo…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[232,4308,780,781,180],"class_list":["post-14887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-game","tag-heads","tag-mit","tag-review","tag-technology"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FIFA-main-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}