Australia to launch new batting analysis technology for home summer

Australian sports broadcaster Fox Cricket will launch its advanced ‘Smash Factor’ technology, which will provide an extraordinary level of batting analysis for the audience in real-time courtesy a tiny sensor hidden behind the sticker that is present on the back of the players’ bat.

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'Smash Factor' will help in measuring data such as bat speed, power in the shot, timing & launch angle while the sensor will also pick up vibrations off the bat to determine an accurate reading out of 100 for whether the player has hit the ball out of the middle of the bat.

Swing radars have been important in baseball and golf coverage for quite some time now, but as the nature of cricket is 360-degrees, it was impossible to replicate the technology until now.

Divino, which is a company based in Boston in collaboration with Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has found a solution to this issue by creating a sensor that weighs only as much as a credit card. It can break down and display every element of a batsman’s technique.

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Fox Cricket is set to develop an innovation that will finally take away the guess factor of determining whether the ball has been hit with the sweet spot. Majority of the Australian players have already agreed to collaborate this summer.

The channel's executive producer Brad McNamara, who had been trying to get this technology right for years now, said that it was very, very difficult to change people’s way of looking at things when he went against traditional conventions in cricket. He had already realized that putting anything on a bat was always going to be difficult.  Whatever they put on a players’ bat firstly, had to not affect the integrity or the balance of the bat, which was not easily to do. He added that initially, there were issues in a bat's handles which had put the balance of a bat off and they were too long to not make the players like them longer. As a result, they were forced to come up with something the players didn’t know was there. 

Smash Factor not just all about the big hits: McNamara

He went on to say that 'Smash Factor' was not just all about big hits. They will also be able to get very technical with measurements of bat face angles and back lifts helping them dissect, demonstrate and tell the stories of individual batting techniques. Technology like Ball Tracker and Snicko had focused on what the bowler was trying to do to get players’ out, but Smash Factor was a technology purely dedicated to the art of batting. There was also an app available to cricketers at every level so they can compare their ‘Smash Factor’ with the pros and players around the world.

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