MatchPad: Interactive Glyph‐Based Visualization for Real‐Time Sports Performance Analysis

Abstract

Today real‐time sports performance analysis is a crucial aspect of matches in many major sports. For example, in soccer and rugby, team analysts may annotate videos during the matches by tagging specific actions and events, which typically result in some summary statistics and a large spreadsheet of recorded actions and events. To a coach, the summary statistics (e.g., the percentage of ball possession) lacks sufficient details, while reading the spreadsheet is time‐consuming and making decisions based on the spreadsheet in real‐time is thereby impossible. In this paper, we present a visualization solution to the current problem in real‐time sports performance analysis. We adopt a glyph‐based visual design to enable coaching staff and analysts to visualize actions and events “at a glance”. We discuss the relative merits of metaphoric glyphs in comparison with other types of glyph designs in this particular application. We describe an algorithm for managing the glyph layout at different spatial scales in interactive visualization. We demonstrate the use of this technical approach through its application in rugby, for which we delivered the visualization software, MatchPad, on a tablet computer. The MatchPad was used by the Welsh Rugby Union during the Rugby World Cup 2011. It successfully helped coaching staff and team analysts to examine actions and events in detail whilst maintaining a clear overview of the match, and assisted in their decision making during the matches. It also allows coaches to convey crucial information back to the players in a visually‐engaging manner to help improve their performance.

Order of Magnitude Markers: An Empirical Study on Large Magnitude Number Detection

“…Future investigations should address both aspects by looking at the marker's design features which, if considered in the context of large datasets, experience similar limitations to that of glyph design, and learnability, by assessing the learning curve of users [2,3,13]. Semantic complexity and learnability are closely related concepts, simpler representations are easier to learn, the challenge is to find the appropriate trade-off between simplicity and expressiveness.…”

Knowledge-Assisted Ranking: A Visual Analytic Application for Sports Event Data

“…Extending our system to other team sports such as football, basketball, and hockey would simply require adapting the event mapping in the glyph-based design as in [11]. A potential issue is with the scalability of our visualization such as the glyph-based canvas.…”

“…We take advantage of the recent work by Legg et al [11] who demonstrate the usability of glyphs in rugby. Each glyph encodes an event data, which we then position along two primary axes.…”

“…We therefore adopt the glyphs used in [6,11] to encode the event properties as indicated on the glyph control panel in Figure 1. The glyphs that have a purple halo indicate events that resulted to a point scored (see Figure 7 for example).…”

Bring It to the Pitch: Combining Video and Movement Data to Enhance Team Sport Analysis

“…Legg et al [28] try to capture and visualize the course of a match in an abstract and summarizing manner. They employ a timeline, depicting important events like shot on goal, as well as additional information and indicators for the outcome of different events.…”