Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Bugged Balls For Tough Calls (11 Jun 2005) With ball and players equipped with transmitters, soccer fans and team coaches would be able to know the speed of a shot or how close it passed by the goal, or determine which players ran the most during a game—or perhaps find the laziest. Location systems like the one developed by Fraunhofer are finding their way into a number of applications beyond sports, because they work in closed spaces where GPS isn't always reliable. "With GPS, the initial set of applications was quite narrow, but suddenly people came up with all sorts of different uses for it," says Andy Ward, chief technology officer at Ubisense Ltd., a company in Cambridge, England, that sells location systems for office automation and military training. "We think that with indoor [location technology], there is going to be a similar kind of move." That means transmitters like those Adidas is putting into its balls may soon help track containers in warehouses, shopping carts in supermarkets, medical equipment in hospitals, and inmates in prisons. But first these transmitters have to get cheaper, costing tens of cents rather than tens of dollars, a challenge much like that faced by radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. Article URL: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/jun05/0605nball.html Read 87 more articles from IEEE Spectrum sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Ginny Redish     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy