Instant Replay Challenge—A Thought Exercise

[joelg236]

Very cool idea. My immediate reaction is to say that it should be divided in two sections:

1. Hardware - This includes everything from camera placement to wiring to how video streams get streamlined into one output.
2. Software - How the video can be brought into one central stream for live streams / big screens, while still storing that video in a way that it could be accessed very quickly without hassle.

How could you make such a system easy to use for operators, low cost (ie. not 100 cameras everywhere) and still good enough to be useful? It's an interesting project. Maybe the software side could be open-sourced and if there is enough interest the talented people in FRC could figure something out. I imagine hardware would be the biggest challenge, and I'm not even sure where to start. Every venue has a different layout with different ways to set up, and having to individually plan each one specifically would be a huge hassle. And I'm probably not even thinking of the biggest challenge, which would be making the video "unbiased".

Even if some kind of system was made that worked really well, I have no doubt people would still complain. "The camera just wasn't focused on us when we got hit" type deal.

Just some initial thoughts, I'll have to sleep on it.