SensoMotoric Instruments-Teaching Baseball Professionals with Mobile Eye Tracking

BERLIN, GERMANY, February 24, 2011

Mobile eyetracking by SMI SensoMotoric Instruments GmbH (SMI), a leader in eye tracking technology, was used by Bixie Baseball Academy based in Eindhoven, Netherlands, to improve training methods of Baseball professionals and high potential talents. A video on eye tracking studies in sports shows the SMI head-mounted mobile eye tracker capturing gaze data of players performing typical tasks in practice.

Martijn Nijhoff, coach for the dutch national youth team under 19 years old, talent coach for the dutch baseball: "Eye tracking in Baseball has been very useful to me because you cannot trust what the players tell you where they were looking. One of the pitchers was constantly throwing the ball too high. When checking his gaze behavior we found that he was focusing 5m short of the homeplate."

Since hand and eye coordination is the key issue in many ball sports, eye tracking in sports can play a major role in allowing both scientists and trainers to evaluate and measure the progress of their athletes. Analyzing gaze strategies and showing players their own gaze behavior is an efficient method to improve a critical factor for performance. It helps players to better practice their ability to focus on visual cues.

Due to the demanding environments and situations found in most sports, the productive use of eye tracking with real-world tasks requires robust technology that is still easy to wear and non-invasive. The SMI HED eye tracker consists of a Basecap with two camera systems attached to it. One camera is capturing the eye image, the other system films the scene a person is looking at. The eye tracking software then maps the gaze data on the scene video.

Bixie Baseball academy (www.bixibaseball.nl) coaches some of the most renowned Baseball players of the Netherlands.

Case Study Baseball: http://www.smivision.com/index.php?id=377

SensoMotoric Instruments GmbH (SMI) (www.smivision.com) is a world leader in dedicated computer vision applications, developing and marketing eye & gaze tracking systems and OEM solutions for a wide range of applications such as marketing, human-computer-interfaces, ophthalmology, neurology, psychology, ergonomics and usability. SMI serves customers around the globe from offices in Teltow, near Berlin, Germany and Boston, USA, backed by a network of trusted local partners in many countries.