Gadgets In The Modern Cricket Coverage

1. Hawkeye

Hawkeye consists of six high-speed video cameras placed high above the court to track the trajectory (path followed) of the ball. It can point out the bounce of the ball upto the precision of 3mm. It was invented by Dr.Paul Hawkins (hence the name Hawkeye), a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and has also played for Buckinghamshire. He feld the need of having a better system to judge LBWs and thus came up with the system we know as Hawkeye. The cameras record the movement of ball at the rate of 60 frames per second.

2. Hot Spot (Red Zone)

Hot spot uses two infra-red cameras positioned at the either ends of the ground. These cameras sense and measure heat from friction generated by collision such as ball on bat,pad,wickets etc. Using a special technique called Subtraction technique, a series of black and white frames is generated localizing the ball’s point of contact.

3. Speed Gun

A speed gun measures the ball speed by measuring round trip time for the light to reach and reflect back from the wall. It shoots a very short burst of infra-red laser and receives it back. The gun, upon the return of laser counts the nanoseconds it took the light to travel to and from the ball, divides it by two and gives the speed of the ball.

4. Inbuilt Speed Sensor Ball

It measures the speed of ball when it is released from the bowler’s hands and hits something like bat or practice net. They are seldom used in proper matches and only used in practice nets as the sensors can get damaged when hit hard.

5. Snickometer

Snickometer is used to graphically analyze sound in situations like when ball hits the wickets, bat edge. It was developed in mid 1990s but only popularly known in recent decade.

Commentators use this tool to tell if the ball did hit the bat before the keeper caught the ball to tell if the batsman is out or not. The type of waveform tells what type of contact was made with the ball, whether the pads or bat etc.