* Wi-Fi-enabled devices let Pittsburgh Penguins fans get in on the action
You don’t have to be from Pittsburgh to be a fan of the Stanley Cup-winning Pittsburgh Penguins. A common question among those fans this spring was, “Did yinz see the game last night?”‘ Fans who attended games at Mellon Arena saw lots of action via the new mobile video service called Yinz Cam, created by a Carnegie Mellon professor and her students. Yinz Cam represents the future of mobile services.
What do you get when you cross a Carnegie Mellon University computer engineering class with Pittsburgh Penguins hockey? You get a new mobile video service known as Yinz Cam. Though the service name might be a bit cheeky — “yinz”‘ being the Pittsburgh equivalent of “y’all” — the actual service is anything but a joke.
Yinz Cam delivers free, live, close-up video of the action at Penguins hockey games to fans in the stands of Mellon Arena via Wi-Fi-enabled devices. The service was developed by Priya Narasimhan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science with the Carnegie Mellon Mobility Research Center, which she then incorporated into her classes as a project for the students. Their task: to implement the service throughout the arena and make it available and useful to attendees at the Pens games. Yinz Cam went live on Feb. 6, 2009 — in time for the season that culminated in the Pens winning the Stanley Cup. If ever there was a trial by fire for a class project, this was it.
Yinz Cam allows hockey fans to display the live video from multiple cameras placed around the arena on their handhelds devices. Now a fan in the nosebleed seats can call up the camera in front of the players’ bench and view the real nosebleed that resulted from the rough action on the rink. Then he can switch to the action just in front of the net to see the goalie fend off the shot. Was there a penalty on the play? The fan can bring up a replay of the action to check it out for himself. With a wide variety of camera angles available for instant viewing, the fan can get more involved in the game.
Complementing the live camera action, Yinz Cam also has biographical information on the players, schedules for future games, video clips from previous games, and — most practical — “Food Cam” and “Restroom Cam,” which show how long the lines are at these respective stations. The hockey fans have embraced the system, and Dave Soltesz, Pittsburgh Penguins senior vice president of sales, says it provides a unique customer experience.
Aside from amusing the fans, Yinz Cam has been a practical learning experience for the computer engineering and computer science students. They learned the networking techniques to install the Wi-Fi to cover the entire arena, with capacity enough to support as many as 17,500 users demanding streaming video. Security was a concern as well, to ensure that anyone outside Mellon Arena could not access the live content. Allowing outside access would cause a conflict with the companies that owned the broadcast rights to the games.
The software developers learned the practical aspects of creating the application that lets users choose what they want to do, whether it’s displaying the video, looking at statistics and biographies, or planning to attend future games based on the team schedule. And, the applications had to be optimized for mobility so that users could access them via an iPhone, BlackBerry or some other handheld device.
In all, Yinz Cam proved to be a very fun yet practical class project. Student Michael Chuang said, “What is so great about this research is being able to combine our love of sports with technology that will ultimately improve lives.”
The concepts behind Yinz Cam could have many commercial uses. For example, consider its use for security surveillance, whereby cameras are distributed throughout a facility and security personnel who are guarding the premises can access live video on their handheld devices. The guards wouldn’t have to be restricted to an immobile monitoring station in order to view the video, as is common today. Or consider how Yinz Cam could be applied in a hospital. Cameras in patient rooms can capture live video and send it to nurses and doctors. A patient’s medical records could be called up on the screen, just as hockey fans now retrieve players’ biographies and statistics.
Though Yinz Cam is a mobile application with a funny name, the experience the students acquired while implementing Yinz Cam is totally serious. Hopefully we’ll see some interesting mobile applications coming from these students as they become computer engineers and technology entrepreneurs after graduation.
