The Premier League, England’s top-division professional football competition, is set to adopt the iPhone and its camera for a new offside detection system as part of the video assistant referee (VAR) mechanism, according to a new report from Wired.
The new system, dubbed “Dragon,” will be deployed by Genius Sports and its subsidiary Second Spectrum. The firm already manages optical tracking systems in the NBA, and the iPhone-based VAR system for the Premier League will begin rolling out during the upcoming 2024-2025 season.
The Dragon system will be based on dozens of iPhone units strategically placed around the football pitch. The iPhone’s camera is then used to capture high-frame-rate video from multiple angles. Dragon’s custom software allows for multiple iPhones to seamlessly work together using video feeds from different devices around the pitch, creating a continuous image that helps human referees come to a more accurate offside decision.
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Dragon will initially deploy 28 iPhone cameras across every Premier League stadium. The system is based on the iPhone 14 and newer, with four iPhone units grouped in a single waterproof enclosure fitted with cooling fans and a power source. This means each Premier League stadium will have seven iPhone video streaming clusters placed around. However, Dragon can easily be scaled up to include more iPhone clusters in bigger stadiums.
The iPhone clusters are placed around the pitch, communicating to provide a constant multi-angle video stream to VAR referees. Thanks to the iPhone’s high camera resolution and frames-per-second count, Dragon can record and process between 7,000 and 10,000 points on each player. This is a dramatic increase from the maximum of 50 data points per player on today’s VAR video system.
In addition to the massive number of data points per player, Dragon records video in 100 frames per second, a sizable increase from the 50 to 60 frames per second limit of TV broadcast video today. Moreover, Dragon uses an AI system to create an “object semantic mesh,” a 3D and occlusion-free visual representation of the player’s movement on the pitch.
This should result in more accurate offside decisions from referees and the VAR system that has recently attracted criticism due to perceived inconsistency, slowness in locking down a decision, and human error. While human referees will still have the final say over offside decisions, the iPhone-powered Dragon should help mitigate many issues plaguing the VAR system.
