Speculur
Re-imagine Sports

The year was 2003. A capacity crowd of partisan supporters bathed the SuperSports Park at Centurion, in shades of blue and green, setting the stage for another epic chapter in one of cricket’s greatest rivalries–India v Pakistan - at the ICC Cricket World Cup - the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Chasing 274 to win against a formidable Pakistan bowling line up–Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akhtar, Abdul Razzaq and Shahid Afridi on a lively South African pitch, India had it all to do. India also had Sachin Tendulkar.

Shoaib Akhtar kept hurling 150 kmph thunderbolts and Sachin kept peppering the advertising boards, stroke after stroke. Sachin had set the pace for a successful Indian run chase, his 35th ODI century, looking largely inevitable. In the 27th over, Akhtar served up a snorter and bounced Tendulkar out, two runs shy. As Tendulkar walked back towards the dressing room, the television broadcast projects the tracked metrics such as Akhtar’s ball trajectory, bowling speed, pitch, and bounce.

"Speculur Batsense Captures Back-Lift, Bat Speed, Bat Angle, And Follow-Through For Every Shot, Analyses Them And Projects The Data On A Mobile Application"

Although the availability of all these data adds to enriching the viewer experience, the core statistics providing greater insight into a player’s attributes, remain largely untapped. There is a gap in data and technology in cricket–both as a player and a viewer. There is a lot of data and technology geared towards how to adjudge whether batsmen are out or not, but in the 14 years since Sachin’s epic in 2003, cricket hasn’t moved much further, to technologies and data that help batsmen record and analyze, every shot they play–good, bad or ugly.

What if players, coaches, and the audience could see, track, quantify, and assess matrices like the angle at which a player lifts the bat, speed at which it is swung, bat-speed when it hits the ball, and the back-lift of the player when facing bowlers? Take it up a notch; what if there were high-end sensors on each crucial vertex of a player—from jerseys to gloves to helmets and shoes—enabling his/ her entire actions to be animated in real-time, alongside providing unique data regarding each ball played?

Sure, all this sounds straight of a Hollywood Sci-fi production – but as the old adage goes, truth is stranger than fiction! For the best part of the past three years, these technology fantasies have been diligently worked upon by a battery of scientists, engineers, cricketers, coaches and visionaries, to slowly turn science-fiction into reality.

Head-quartered at Bangalore, India, Speculur Technology Solutions is spearheading the wearables and data in sport revolution, one sensor at a time. Speculur Batsense is the flagship product - a mere 25-gram sensor, with a form factor the similar to a soda-bottle cap that affixes atop a bat’s handle.

Developed in collaboration with technology behemoth Intel and enriched with testing data from over 500,000 shots played, Speculur BatSense is a truly path-breaking product. It captures crucial batting parameters like back-lift, bat speed, bat angle, and follow-through for every shot, analyses these parameters and then projects the data on a purpose designed mobile application. Equipped with advanced sensors including an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer, this tiny device is capable of recording vital details, including the number of balls played and maximum bat speed, among others.

In effect, the insights that presently are available to only the elite professionals, the top 1 percent, by means of expensive video analysis techniques, will now be available to any cricketer at any level. Cricket may stand truly democratized as Speculur engineers down millions of dollars worth of technology, down to a sensor you can hold in your palm.

Batsense reads and decodes the motion of the bat based on nine different axes and self-develops the algorithms by studying the corresponding readings. The device is powered by an Intel Curie processor and is capable of recording eight hours of data, which can be directly synchronized to the mobile application. The device’s AI and machine learning prowess comes into play while understanding different batting styles of different players and developing the motion-detection algorithms accordingly. Hence, owing to its next-generation intuitive AI, Batsense becomes more intelligent, the more it is used. To back the massive amount of data from multiple sensory units working in tandem, coupled with a seamless user experience, Speculur has designed a state-of-the-art mobile application, which is supported on both iOS and Android platforms. The application is capable of projecting a live three-dimensional avatar of the batsman playing on field to the team management officials and coaches, even from two different corners of the world. To constantly enhance Batsense’s level of accuracy, Speculur records every shot using high-end cameras, the output from which is further monitored, correlated and analyzed in the laboratories.

“With ceaseless research and development in two labs—Santa Clara and Bangalore—it has taken us three years of hard work to bring this product to reality,” says Atul Srivastava, Founder & MD of Speculur. In the ICC Champions Trophy 2017, held in England, Batsense made its debut, as it enabled mass broadcasting of advanced statistics, alongside next-generation analytics during live matches.

David Warner went to the field against New Zealand, his bat equipped with Speculur’s Batsense, and the Australian vice-captain reviewed Batsense’s capability to quantify every shot as something cricketers have not experienced before. Enthused to be involved with the development of the product, Warner said, “Irrespective of whether I am in form or not, if I have seamless access to my data, I can compare these two sets of data in real-time to understand where I am going wrong; whether any mistakes have unknowingly crept in.”

Apart from David Warner, Speculur Batsense has thus far received favorable responses not only from cricketers like New Zealand’s Luke Ronchi and India’s Ravichandran Ashwin and Karun Nair, also from coaches, and cricket academies across the cricketing world.

Other Smart Products

Giving Speculur a fillip in its development efforts is their Joint Venture partner – Silicon Valley based technology experts, Infostretch Corporation. Speculur and Infostretch are working on the progressive path of Speculur wearables and models for meaningful analysis of the anticipated ensuing data.

This range of smart cricket equipment will include a smart ball, helmet and shoes. On one side where the ball-sensor would be exploiting motion or dynamic power sources to charge it, Speculur’s helmet-sensor is anticipated to bring another impossible to reality—predicting injuries. Lastly, Speculur’s shoe-sensor will be capable of gathering an entire range of data related to front-foot or back-foot movements and provide insights on how to improvise on the flaws. All these smart-products, in conjunction, will be able to animate a player’s actions in real-time, allowing coaches and players to improve on-field performances at an unhindered pace. “We are ushering in a remarkable amalgamation of engineering, wearable devices and data analytics. Down the line, I see our smart-products as necessary components in every player’s kitbag,” informs Srivastava.

Speculur aims at launching smart IoT products for golf-clubs, badminton racquets, tennis racquets, and boxing gloves as well. Envisioned to be launched every second quarter, the broad set of forward-looking offerings from Speculur are firmly poised to push the envelope of sports-technology, totally revamping the way we play and see a game.

Speculur envisages making its products available to every sports enthusiast across all academies in India, as well as all across the world. Srivastava vents his concern regarding the contemporary sports technology sector, saying, “Although cricket is a popular sport in many APAC nations, until one starts playing for the national team, cricketers do not have any tool that will help them improve the technical aspects of their game.” Only at that level do players get live coverage, replays, and slow motions. In a sport like cricket, that demands a tremendous amount of practice and skill, the traditional hawk-eye video analysis is, to date, the only tool used to study players’ capabilities and consequently rectify errors. Speculur’s smart technologies will capture and enable analysis of real-time data by players and coaches, allowing to work on the weaknesses from a very early stage. The products will help budding cricketers to have a thorough comprehension of their mistakes, scrutinize the mover time, and iron out their weaknesses.

Therefore, the next time a player has a low-scoring run or encounters repetitive hurdles regarding performance, Speculur’s smart products may help identify the loopholes and enhance on the necessary attributes. With its immense potential to be able to help athletes across the globe, Speculur and its future-oriented sports products mark the beginning of a new era of sports technology.