Baseball is going mobile, with an animated twist. Broadcasting live American and Japanese professional baseball games over DoCoMo's 3G cell phone service, Tokyo-based Craftmax's Digital Stadium is transforming real-time action into animated play-by-play representations of the game.

By minimizing communication data, the program enables users to hold data transfer costs from streaming live video. When users connect to the Digital Stadium site from the middle of a game, "catch up playback" goes into action. A high-speed playback shows the progress of the game up to the point of connection. There is also a "highlight playback" which shows only scoring scenes, a data playback function only digital data can produce.

Digital Stadium holds a database of 30,000 plays that takes place in baseball games. With this database, it reproduces players' and ball's movements on the screen of a phone; simulating the action of a pitcher, fielder and runner.

Viewers can listen to the roar of the crowd and sound effects for hits, runs, and scores. Make no mistake, this is real baseball, not an online game; just converted into animation.

1. Posted by Pogo	Tue Apr 12, 2005 10:36 pm
Neat idea, but once broadband and video streaming take off, it'll be dead.
2. Posted by mgoblue	Wed Apr 13, 2005 7:22 am
Until bandwidth costs come down for mobile devices I think this is a great idea, though baseball is the only sport it'll work well with. Other sports that are high in action probably wouldn't work so well.

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