Here's another interesting patent application I found. (This is something I do at work when things get slow.) Curling is only mentioned once in this patent, which is obviously targeted at golf, but let's talk about it anyway. Here's a picture for the golf scenario.
This is a fairly long patent (27 pages with 14 pages of text), but I believe the gist of the idea is on a golf course, you set up lots of radio transmitters. As a golf ball is in the air, radio signals will bounce off the golf ball. This happens many times a second and by analyzing how all these radio signals from all of the radio transmitters are affected by the golf ball, one can discern the true path of the golf ball and its rotation while it was in the air. Additionally, you can add other sensors for measuring wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, and any other environmental factors that may also contribute to the golf ball path.
This seems really complicated and expensive. I can imagine that there are easily thousands of dollars of hardware needed to set this up for just one hole in golf. I can also see that an elite golfer could really learn something if all of this data were available for analysis.
Back to curling. As I said earlier, curling is mentioned once (page 16) in a list of of sports where this technology could be used. This list also included a number of popular sports (including, inexplicably, boxing) so adding curling to this was a clear attempt to make the patent as broad as possible. I'm not a patent attorney, but my guess is that if someone designed something like this specific to curling and patented it, I doubt there would really be an infringement.
But would this be valuable in curling? I think you would need an empty curling club to make this work. Otherwise, you'd have lots of people and dozens of rocks that would cause interference to radio signals. But if it were possible, how valuable is it to know the speed and rotation of a rock as it goes down the ice? I can see some value in that, but maybe not with a system like this.
This is a fairly long patent (27 pages with 14 pages of text), but I believe the gist of the idea is on a golf course, you set up lots of radio transmitters. As a golf ball is in the air, radio signals will bounce off the golf ball. This happens many times a second and by analyzing how all these radio signals from all of the radio transmitters are affected by the golf ball, one can discern the true path of the golf ball and its rotation while it was in the air. Additionally, you can add other sensors for measuring wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, and any other environmental factors that may also contribute to the golf ball path.
This seems really complicated and expensive. I can imagine that there are easily thousands of dollars of hardware needed to set this up for just one hole in golf. I can also see that an elite golfer could really learn something if all of this data were available for analysis.
Back to curling. As I said earlier, curling is mentioned once (page 16) in a list of of sports where this technology could be used. This list also included a number of popular sports (including, inexplicably, boxing) so adding curling to this was a clear attempt to make the patent as broad as possible. I'm not a patent attorney, but my guess is that if someone designed something like this specific to curling and patented it, I doubt there would really be an infringement.
But would this be valuable in curling? I think you would need an empty curling club to make this work. Otherwise, you'd have lots of people and dozens of rocks that would cause interference to radio signals. But if it were possible, how valuable is it to know the speed and rotation of a rock as it goes down the ice? I can see some value in that, but maybe not with a system like this.
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