Hawkeye

So you have all heard the name in cricket and tennis and now even snooker has this new inventive technology, but what is it and what does it do and more interestingly will it be used in the future to help judgments in snooker competitions?

The Facts
Hawkeye is a system where a number of cameras are placed around the playing areas in our case a snooker table, a computer then calculates all of the data from the cameras and builds a 3D model of what is happening on the table, the cameras are at such a resolution that the computer can gain vital information like speed and trajectory of the balls on the table.

We have all see Hawkeye being used in the cricket for several years now and to a extent it has taken some of the boredom out of watching the cricket for the novice fan, personally I enjoy listening to the cricket one Talk Sport (Mike Atherton & ) or Radio 5 while whirling away on my computer but tennis has taken Hawkeye to the next step by actually allowing the information that Hawkeye uses to be used in game judgments, this came in 17 October 2005 when a press release stated

"Hawk-Eye, the world's leading ball tracking system, owned by The Television
Corporation Plc, has successfully passed the International Tennis Federation
(ITF) electronic line calling evaluation, enabling the system to now be used as
an official on-court umpiring aid."

Now my question is "Will Hawkeye be used in the future to assist a referee in Snooker?"

Referees have used Hawkeye in the past to reset the balls after a foul and miss situation when a large number of balls have been displaced or the placement of the cue ball is vital.

Is all of this technology taking the fun out of sports with more and more games looking towards Hawkeye we will be looking more and more to a computer than a referee or judge to a final decision, having that doubt if the ball is or is not over the line (Tennis) is all apart of the fun not that John McEnroe would agree with me!

Now I remember the Crucible (2206) when the electronic scoring system went down and Peter Ebdon www.ProSnookookerRef.co.uk had to grab his old wooden score board form under The Markers Desk, but just in time the system was back up and running again and they continued the game, but if our reliance is so heavy on these systems to make the decisions what if it all goes wrong then what? It reminds me of the situation in the Tom Cruise film Minority Report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_%28film%29 where there has not been a murder for such a long time that the detectives do not know what to do when there is a murder.

Reference Information
The creators of Hawkeye The Television Corporation Plc (Paul Hawkins) http://www.televisioncorporation.co.uk