Brainstorm - The Blue Alliance v4

[Tom Line]

When I go to a particular team, I'd like to see a button next to each match that says "Add a video".

Generally, my use of Blue Alliance is limited to going to www.thebluealliance.net, then typing in a team number. On numerous occasions I know there are youtube videos of a given match, but there is no obvious way to add the video.

For instance, I know that there are youtube videos from our team for various State Champ matches. How the heck do I attach them to our matches on blue alliance, or suggest they get attached?

[Tanner]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

For instance, I know that there are youtube videos from our team for various State Champ matches. How the heck do I attach them to our matches on blue alliance, or suggest they get attached?

I would have like a "add a video" button for matches that don't have videos, then the page would prompt you if you would like to upload a video or link to a video sharing site with the video. The first option is preferred, but anything is better than nothing.

-Tanner

[Tom Bottiglieri]

One feature that would be nice is a mode for team demos/presentations. Basically this could be something as simple as a looping playlist of your team's best match videos (automatically generated or user selected), and could be grown to have a full screens worth of content, including photos, team stats, etc.

Robot demos are great, but there will always be down time and confusion over explaining the large scale implementation of the game. Videos help with this problem, but right now it's a bit hard to just pull up a demo's worth of content without having to do some work up front or maintain the presentation.

[jblay]

I would include a feature where teams could put a pre-competition video of their robot similar to the picture option because I feel like this last year a lot more teams have videos of their bots before competition than ever before and more and more teams are going to do it in the future and it would be a nice thing to have on that page.

[Joe G.]

Small pet peeve with the current site: If I am watching, say, 2008 matches, and click a team number in-video, it directs me to that team's 2010 page. Directing these links to the "proper" year would be nice.

And a second vote for the team-editable robot-information page.

[delsaner]

Some of my thoughts and recommendations have probably been mentioned before, but I'll list them.

1) A list of awards at the end of the competition.

2) More videos and pictures of different teams.

3) Results of some offseason events (BattleCry, IRI, etc.)

4) A mass list of every FIRST team (along with their number, location, etc.) This could link to their TBA page. Think of it as a "Teams Attending" list, but every FIRST team is on the list.

Sorry if these sound like assertive orders. Just thoughts that I personally would like.

[SavtaKenneth]

I'd like to see a summary of all the awards and placement at each competition the team had on their team page. Apart from that it'd be nice to have a seedings page and alliance selection results and order if possible.

[CalTran]

I think that a "team comparison" section would be much appreciated. Like, you can compare team #vs#vs# or something like that

[Andrew Schreiber]

Greg, one of the things I was disappointed in this year was the lack of robot photos. Perhaps if you do decide to offer more in depth analysis you can limit this to people who have submitted a quality picture of THEIR team's robot. I recall SOAP tried this back in 2003 with the release of 111's robot being a SOAP exclusive. Perhaps work with the defending World Champions to release high quality teaser shots to teams that have submitted.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Greg, one of the things I was disappointed in this year was the lack of robot photos. Perhaps if you do decide to offer more in depth analysis you can limit this to people who have submitted a quality picture of THEIR team's robot. I recall SOAP tried this back in 2003 with the release of 111's robot being a SOAP exclusive. Perhaps work with the defending World Champions to release high quality teaser shots to teams that have submitted.

If you could not overwrite team submitted photos with blurry pit scouting photos, that'd be ideal as well. Hell, add support for multiple photos as long as there's a complete rewrite.

[M.Wong]

Integration with the First Wiki?

[keehun]

Maybe hop on the HTML5 bandwagon... :-)

[Chris is me]

A random suggestion: Often I'll go straight to /tbatv/team/xxxx and type the wrong number. This redirects me straight to a tumblr page, which means I have to retype the whole URL to "try again". If you could leave random unassigned teams / events at a 404 type page, that would be much preferred.

[Dale]

Having a place for teams to describe the features of their robot and have multiple robot photos (or videos) would be a huge help in scouting. The bluealliance could become the first place everyone goes when getting ready for a regional. Currently, at least for early regionals, there's not much reason to go to TBA because video hasn't been loaded yet and all you get is a picture of the robot (if that).

The field video feed isn't all that useful in scouting because it hops around so much between robots or pictures of the drivers(!). Having video clips the teams (or others) load of that particular robot in action would be more helpful.

When uploading robot picture(s) it should be possible to send large files and have the site scale them down and rotate them if needed. Often times the robot picture in done in portrait but the site wants landscape as I recall.

[artdutra04]

Right now teams post content everywhere, on team sites, Chief Delphi, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Flickr, Picassa... During the competition season trying to find videos or photos of robots is difficult. Most can be found with enough persistence, but it's difficult. The content usually already exists, so a very good feature would be to help get a lot of the external content embedded or linked to from the TBA page.

One initial one would be to upload a photo to CD-Media, and tag it with YYYY robot and frcXXXX, where YYYY is the current year, and XXXX is your team number. Since the photo gets approved to CD, then it's an appropriate photo. This photo can either be an embedded image or a link to CD-Media. Maybe even cache the thumbnail and link to original on CD to avoid bandwidth leeching. This system would replace the current "email to TBA" means for getting team photos on the site, as it would use the the strengths of CD-Media and TBA to complement each other.

Another way would be to add in links to YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, Flickr and/or content on a team's website (URL domain name must match the one listed in FIRST database) for additional videos and photos. I don't really like the idea of "team inputted robot information", as all teams beat their chest and exaggerate their abilities. But photos and videos of robots are harder to fake. It's easier to see if the team's claims are true.

Host official match video in a downloadable format on your server (h.264 or MPEG-4, so they're viewable on mobile devices). Upload the streaming versions of the match videos to YouTube or Vimeo. (Is there a Vimeo iPod/iPhone/iPad app?)

Create a means for user-submitted match videos on YouTube or Vimeo to be added to matches. Provides another point of view, and can help get some video for matches which have no official video recordings.

I've been thinking about using YouTube/Vimeo/Flickr tags or Twitter hashtags to automatically pull in content, but verifying it's authentic and not spam might be difficult. But this would be awesome if some kind of solution is worked out. (Maybe a team can have a specific "whitelist" of specific accounts to look for video/content from?) Maybe this solution can even be extended to matches: tag the match video with the proper naming convention already used for videos on the site, and it'll automatically pull the video into the site.

Sorry if these thoughts seem meandering. Just thinking out loud.