Sir Ian Taylor now calls a prized technological innovation that has enhanced the understanding of cricket “the Bumrah”.
The Kiwi who has taken Virtual Eye to the world said he had never seen his technology work more effectively than when it explained the unique biomechanics that made Jasprit Bumrah almost unplayable from one side of the Nullarbor Plain to the other last summer.
The graphics produced to dissect Bumrah’s brilliance are a prime demonstration of the effectiveness of the Dunedin-based company’s product, which this week saw Taylor receive a prestigious global distinction.
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Bumrah rips through the Aussie openers | 00:54
Storytelling in cricket has come a long way from the days where a radar gun was used to identify the speed of a bowler, with rapid advances in camera technology and artificial intelligence enhancing television coverage, and the New Zealander’s company has been at the forefront driving that excellence.
“Our job is to show people who are sitting on the couch why they are there and why the people they are watching are so good. We want to explain the difference,” Taylor said.
Through technology capable of catching 250 frames per second, and encompassing the 540 balls or more bowled in a Test each day, Virtual Eye was able isolate the distinctive characteristics of the champion and explain how he was befuddling Australia’s top order.
“The Bumrah illustration is probably the one that had the biggest impact. So whenever anyone ever asks for a breakdown of a bowler, we call it a ‘Bumrah’. The detail of what we can tell has come so far,” Taylor said.
“I can remember Shane Warne really raving about the fact that he never realised how much speed was lost in a delivery from the time it came out of the hand, through the bounce and on to the batsman (until Virtual Eye detailed it). And we can explain that story to viewers.”
A member of the New Zealand Technology Hall of Fame, Taylor was hailed at a function in Sydney on Wednesday night by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers for the work pioneered by Virtual Eye.
“If Bumrah was fit, India were a chance” | 02:08
The Virtual Eye insights are also a significant contributor to the broader package resulting in the Foxtel/Kayo Sports broadcasting of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy receiving a nomination for the Best Sports Coverage at the Logies in the harbour city on Sunday night.
Taylor will join icons including George Lucas, James Cameron and Ray Dolby who have been honoured by the SMPTE when he attends the organisation’s global awards ceremony in Pasadena in October.
A former presenter of Play School in New Zealand, Taylor said he initially suspected he was being scammed when alerted to the honour given the decorated company he will officially join at the ceremony in California.
“I thought, ‘Oh shit. The must think I am a sucker,’” he told foxsports.com.au
“You are up there with Walt Disney and Dolby and others. It does not seem real.”
He credits executives John Evans, who opened the path for his company to work in golf in Australia, and Fox Sports Managing Director Steve Crawley for the opportunity to work in cricket during the 2010/11 Ashes series, for opening the doors to the broader sporting world.
“Receiving the 2025 SMPTE Progress Medal is an extraordinary honour, and it is one I accept on behalf of the remarkable team of people I have had the privilege of working alongside for the past 35 years,” he said at the function on Wednesday night.
“From day one, everything we’ve achieved has been the result of a group of incredibly talented, creative, and committed people who dared to ask, ‘Why not?’, and then just got on with it.
“It is also an acknowledgment of our many industry partners and colleagues who have all shared the singular goal of using technology to tell stories, better. This award belongs to every person who has walked through our doors and added their spark to what we do. I’m just the one lucky enough to be standing here saying thank you.”
Virtual Eye now details the power in the pitchers throwing across 3,500 Major League Baseball games each season, rides the waves with the yachts vying for the Americas Cup and goes from tee to green with the likes of Scottie Scheffler on the PGA Tour.
And it was partners including Fox Sports Australia who played a crucial role in furthering the renown with which Taylor and Virtual Eye are recognised by major sporting codes and broadcasters around the world.
“It took a punt from (the likes of Evans and Crawley) for a little company from New Zealand to do these major Australian summer sports,” Taylor said.
Brad McNamara, the executive producer of Fox Cricket and a former longstanding New South Wales Blues representative, said there was clearly a mutual advantage from working with Virtual Eye, a point Taylor concurs with, with the viewers the ultimate winners.
“Basically, we have gone from having one ball speed that everyone in the world used to get to a point where we are now tracking all the players in everything they do,” McNamara said.
“The collaboration has been great. Because they work with Major League Baseball and all the majors in golf, we’ve benefited from their expertise there, and they’ve benefited from the ideas we’ve come up with in cricket and then taken them to other sports.”
McNamara said the ability to provide detailed graphics in real time demonstrating what was happening with the ball, or why the field was set a certain way, or why the batter was beaten by a bowler, is a gamechanger when it came to broadcasting series like the Ashes.
“Being able to screen these graphics live, I mean, that’s the Holy Grail for broadcasters,” McNamara, who played 59 Sheffield Shield games for NSW, said.
“It is so much better than taking it away, processing it into something and then coming back with it two hours later when the story has gone and the game has moved on.
“We saw through the India series massive numbers, because it was such a big series, and looking ahead to the Ashes, it’s clearly going to be massive again, as it always is.
“With Virtual Eye analysing millions of frames of data a day, we will be able to tell stories about every player’s tendencies, including some they might not even be aware of.
“We could be considering stories like, ‘When does Pat Cummins start getting tired? When does he start slowing down? Does his length drop as a result? Or how fast is Mark Wood? And when does he start to drop off? How long should his optimal spell be?’. It can be little things like that which add to the viewing experience.”
As innovative as the coverage is, more innovative coverage is in the works for the summer ahead.
In the off-season Virtual Eye has been using thousands of hours of footage provided by Fox Cricket to train its systems to enable even more information for viewers during the Ashes.
As an example, its system can now pick up no balls immediately and with more accuracy than the human eye is capable of.
But not every advance is suitable for broadcasting, Taylor said. Stories have to be informative and entertaining, after all.
“I always joke that we like to keep things simple because sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the hype around a new technology, so we make sure we never use things unless they are actually telling a story,” he said.
With an Ashes series to come, Taylor is eagerly looking forward to the summer ahead, despite being a proud Kiwi. It is a story Fox Cricket is looking forward to telling.
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