Project description
Elevating bowling to meet the needs and demands of an increasingly digital world
Reporting data related to real-time sports events has become increasingly digitalised and high-tech in certain fields. Bowling is one exception. Presentation of information during the game has remained largely unchanged, and it is not particularly user-friendly. The Finnish SME Angular Velocity has developed a bowling ball motion tracking system that records information about the ball in play using advanced sensors and displays it on an easy-to-use app. The system will benefit athletes, coaches and viewers, and data can even be made available to broadcasters. The EU-funded SPECTO Bowling project will support the team in its preparations to commercialise this literally game-changing technology.
Objective
The Sports industry is struggling with how to provide faster and more interesting data to users to keep them engaged. It must adapt to cater for a generation of internet consumers who expect instant gratification and quick fixes. This data-driven society of today draws people’s attention in many directions and Sports are currently not very experience friendly. In the case of bowling games, the information displayed has looked the same for decades, with data shown consisting only of partial and total scoring. Indeed, not very engaging! Current measurement systems that could provide interesting data for wide use is either reactive (i.e. data is available much time past the event) or prohibitively expensive and therefore are only used in laboratories and not in “real life”. Most current systems also require markers or other changes to either the athlete or the equipment, which can suppose a regulatory or practical issue. To solve this problem, Angular Velocity - a Finnish start-up company founded in 2016 - brings SPECTO Bowling® 2.0’s real-time data analytics through a unique combination of hardware and software that gives the ability to measure “everything that goes on” during a bowling event (75 different indicators) and make it instantly usable for display over TV-broadcasts, mobile devices, web services, etc. This ability creates a more immersive scenario and elevates the bowling sport in several aspects: viewers get more engaged in the game, coaches and athletes have a detailed review of the bowling performance, bowling centres can upgrade their systems to a more advanced solution, and bowling organisations can leverage its potential for official measurements, sport promotion and regulatory and standard issues. Our business opportunity is very promising, targeting a market valued at €5 billion globally. We estimate that we will generate €13.7 million of turnover after 3 years of commercialisation (boosting by 50% our current incomes), besides 23 new job positions.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
01490 Vantaa
Finland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.