Saturday, March 3, 2007

The world of cricket animation

Now, whats the next best thing to watching live Cricket on TV ? Following it on the web - considering that the radio has been thrown out of this equation for reasons unknown(At least in India, its largely due to sub-standard commentaries on AIR). Mid nineties, a lot of websites started posting live cricket scores on the web, much to the relief of the office-goers and fans living overseas. And then there were (and still are) a few streaming sites that let you watch live matches over the www. But even with high speed internet, the experience is excruciatingly painful. I remember Irfan Pathan's hat-trick against Pakistan in the Karachi (3rd) Test. I could only see the first 2 wickets fall - that of Salman Butt and Younis Khan. It took me 10 more minutes to figure that he had indeed taken a wicket with the next ball - that of Mohd Yousuf.

Roughly twelve years after web-based scorecards were launched, nothing much has changed - the same sites offer similar services. There are a few Flash based scorecards too, which could marginally improve the user experience. Amidst of all this, enter Cricket animation for live matches - mostly based on Flash.

Our own techies at cricketernews.com thought of building something very similar early in 2006. But we backed away as there were others doing the same thing.

For every action taking place in the field, the animated characters move around a small screen in the browser. For example, if a batsman takes a single, you'll see the two animated characters complete a run. These animations, that I first saw in baseball, are becoming common in Cricket too. It was Yahoo ! who first launched such a service first. Now its Cricinfo, introducing CricInfo 3D. CricInfo's service would let you pick the camera angle and also will provide you with scorecards and statistics. CricInfo says users need a decent processor with at lease 512 MB RAM. They will also have to download Adobe's Shockwave, version 10 or higher.

Lets see if animations satisfy the hunger of office-goers and fans living overseas.

Also read : Brainstorming about P2P cricket videos

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