Jan. 30, 2009 -- Of all the plays that could befall her beloved Pittsburgh Steelers during Sunday's Super Bowl game against the Arizona Cardinals, the one kind that really irks Priya Narasimhan is when she can't see the ball.
That's one impetus behind an engineering project she's overseeing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to embed footballs with satellite-based positioning sensors.
"My personal goal is in four or five years to see this being used in a Super Bowl game -- and I'm on the sideline watching," said Narasimhan, an associate professor of computer engineering a self-described football fanatic. "It's a perfect marriage of two things I'm passionate about."
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As Narasimhan sees it, a football laced with GPS technology would be able to portray the game from the ball's point of view, complete with real-time tracking and virtual three-dimensional flight. The smart ball would be enhanced with a ground-based positioning network to provide accuracy within an inch. (The military usually classifies the most precise GPS data.)
So far, the biggest challenges facing Narasimhan and her team are making the ball light enough to meet league weight requirements and finding a way to provide enough power for the ball's electronics.
"You don't really want the football to have to be plugged into a wall outlet every other play," Narasimhan told Discovery News.
Tracking footballs was not among the uses envisioned for GPS, said Roger Easton, a renowned engineer and scientist who was one of the inventors of the satellite navigation system.
"We figured it would be used in camel trains to keep the camels going in the right direction," Easton told Discovery News.
"We had a little idea that (GPS) would be important, but you couldn't go too far in predicting how much it would do because you're always going to get opposition from people who say it can go too far. Our enemies can use it against us, just as we can use it against our enemies."
Narasimhan's dream of a smarter game doesn't stop with the ball. She's also working on GPS-embedded gloves players can wear to assess how they handle the ball and shoes to gauge the mechanics behind kickers' feet.
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