Artificial intelligence helps Wroclaw basketball players improve tactics and their skills

Wroclaw Basketball Club (WKK) is the largest basketball club training basketball adepts in Poland. It is a fourteen-time Polish youth champion, eight-time Polish vice-champion and two-time Polish championship bronze medalist. It currently trains about 350 children.

In order to make the training of young basketball players even more effective, the Wroclaw club has started cooperation with a young technology company from Latvia – PlayGineering, which offers advanced video analysis, as well as analytics of players’ play based on artificial intelligence. Based on video analysis, it shows where each player is on the field, what he does and how he behaves, as well as evaluating his performance. It also allows broadcasting matches to online platforms.

Thorough analysis of players’ capabilities

The WKK began cooperation with PlayGineering as part of the Poland Prize powered by Concordia Design Accelerator program, co-financed by the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development. This allowed the Wroclaw club to test the solution offered by the Latvian startup for free. PlayGineering installed six cameras in the club’s hall on Czajcza Street, which allow to analyze trainings and matches on video in real time.

“This system has a lot of capabilities, which we are learning and testing their effectiveness. It helps to analyze the game of our players, and thus also to improve them. We are holding international tournaments where we plan to use it. We will certainly want to adapt it to our needs. We are keen to be able to watch the game on video from different perspectives in real time, and to stream matches without a camera operator. We certainly want to develop this project further.”
– says Tomasz Niedbalski, training coordinator at WKK Wroclaw

Fans are looking for good broadcast quality

According to PlayGineering officials, until recently, high technology and broadcast solutions for professional team sports were the privilege of only wealthy leagues and teams, less than 20 percent of teams in total.

For the remaining athletes and their coaches, the cost of tracking players in real time was too high. Therefore, statistics were collected manually, with little precision and low levels of analytics. Typically, sports entertainment content was only created in post-production or with a single handheld camera. Meanwhile, fans of the teams are looking for quality content.

“We are pioneers in sports technology. We have invented a unique way to use artificial intelligence to track players and the ball, create statistics and analyze video. All this in real time, using a single server and a few laptops. In the near future, no hardware other than cameras will be needed, as we will be able to provide everything from the cloud. We are the only provider of player tracking technology that supports 5G technology.”
– says Richard Fomrats, CEO of PlayGineering

Automatic live broadcast of matches

In parallel with player tracking, PlayGineering has developed a unique solution for automatically filming and broadcasting matches from multiple cameras. This allows teams to provide a live stream of their matches on YouTube, for example. Several cameras switch to the actual position of the players at the best angle and follow them with an accuracy comparable to a professional cameraman.

“We are very happy to cooperate with the JCC, because we have the opportunity to test, get feedback and demonstrate our technology to Polish teams. We are helping each other to achieve better results and have a nice experience from our first joint project. We were looking for a place to set up our new company and found Poland Prize, which proved to be a very attractive proposition to move our business to Wroclaw. The cooperation with the Concordia gas pedal was also great. We received really great support there for a good start in Poland.”
– Richard Fomrats, CEO of PlayGineering