As part of its coverage of the 2019 British Open, Sky Sports led the installation of a white dome on the grounds of the Royal Portrush. This mobile volumetric capture studio—the first of its kind—used 120 cameras to render 3D avatars of the golfers for analysis in Sky’s coverage. Nearly a dozen top pros popped in to be recorded.
But the ideal, of course, would be collecting motion data in situ. A sideline re-creation of a golf swing lacks full competitive context. A new collaboration with motion capture startup Movrs—which seeks to provide accurate, photo-real, three-dimensional motion data—could help Sky offer the same swing mechanics insights from the tee box rather than the studio.
The pairing of Movrs and Sky Sports was made as part of the Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech Accelerator, whose second cohort was announced on Tuesday.
“The real focus for us is packaging that data for the media, entertainment and the sports gambling industry,” says Movrs CEO and co-founder Dorian Pieracci. “We provide tools for that [human performance] side because it fits into the business model, but in reality, it’s really about what we do with the data from a more commercial perspective.”
Participation in the Comcast accelerator marks Movrs’ first outside investment to date, with a seed round planned in the near future. The product is camera-agnostic above a few minimum thresholds: five or more cameras and scalable to a hundred-plus as well as a frame rate of at least 120 per second, although ideally 240. Movrs originally started in 2016 as a production studio before recognizing the need for accurate motion data from live events.
Pieracci is a former Cal Berkeley rugby player who worked in talent representation and management. His co-founders are Bob Shafron, a longtime veteran of the visual effects industry who worked with media and entertainment brands, and Abdullah Chand, an AI engineer. Leading business development is Sandy Zinn, a 15-year MLB executive where, as senior director of data operations, he helped manage Statcast and the Automated Balls and Strikes (ABS) system, among other league tech initiatives.
Movrs’ braintrust has a background in baseball, and they plan to develop a motion capture product to assess hitters.
Where Movrs is seeking to differentiate itself from other optical motion capture providers is that media- and business-first approach and an underlying data calculation process that, Pieracci says, permits faster and more accurate collection. The two factors enable each other: the latter streamlines computational modeling, reduces latency and makes evaluation tools available to broadcasters right away. Betting and broadcasting are the prime target—and intertwined—markets.
“We’ve been looking at this space for a while and really through the lens of what Sky Sports is very interested in, which is limb tracking,” says Jenna Kurath, the head of Comcast NBCU SportsTech. “What caught our attention here is their claim of real time [and] being able to really pull that in, in a way that’s accurate.”
Movrs’ motion capture data can be exported to gaming engines such as Unreal or Unity for animated visualizations or even to virtual signage for broadcast overlays.
“We really liked the fact that they were built for media more so than some of the other things we saw out there,” says Boomtown executive director Chris Traeger, whose company partners with Comcast on operating the accelerator. “We saw a lot of performance related things—and Movrs can be that—but many of the performance things were not as translatable to the media side.”
While many motion capture companies use open-source pose estimation libraries for comparative analysis of human movement, Movrs trained its algorithms on proprietary data sets. Apple and Google are among the tech companies that have created body tracking APIs; OpenPose is another popular option. But Pieracci says those models weren’t created to track elite athletic motions the way Movrs developed its system.
Movrs then uses a proprietary approach to apply its algorithms to the live video. “That’s why we can do it in real time,” Pieracci says.
In addition to its upcoming collaboration with Sky Sports through the Comcast accelerator, Movrs has begun doing some early work with a few clients. In one case, they set up a system in the garage of an MLB hitter undergoing rehab to track the progress of his body’s movement and his swing as he sought to return to form. Movrs is also working with an MLB club on developing a human performance product to assess all of its hitters.
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Movrs is also poised to bring advanced analytics to boxing and boxing promotors.
Accurate data collection underpins everything, upon which tools can be built for bespoke needs. That rehabbing player used the data for load management and technique assessment, but other individuals might find a market to use it for coaching or sponsorships.
“That data is no different than that guy’s image and likeness at the end of the day,” Pieracci says. “It’s just another asset of the player that you could go and monetize.”
The other fertile area for early work has been boxing, where Movrs has teamed up with a promoter to create a tool that not only can count punches in real time but also classify them as hook, jab, uppercut and calculate velocity and force metrics. Pieracci is hopeful that could lead to broader adoption in the sport.
“Boxing is unique because there is no there is no advanced analytics for boxing,” he says. “There’s no analytics, really—it’s all collected by hand. Boxing is a unique sport because we could create an official data feed for boxing or for boxing promoters.”
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