Olympics 2022: New Tech Captures Skiers’ In-Air Twists & Turns

From Eileen Gu making sports history in the women’s freestyle skiing big air event to Mikaela Shiffrin’s disappointing starts, Olympic skiing events have taken center stage throughout the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is a key component in bringing these historic performances to the living rooms of audiences worldwide. 

Putting traditional video replays in the past, Baidu AI Cloud’s three-dimensional simulation technology (3D+AI) is changing up the games and is being used in television coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics. 

By capturing and analyzing an athlete’s movement and creating a computer-simulated 3D model of skiers, the 3D+AI is revolutionizing what viewing audiences are watching. It’s also emerging as a training aid to help pinpoint areas impacting performance. 

Baidu AI Cloud created a 1:1 3D motel of the Shougang Ski Jumping Platform that allows it to break down an athlete’s movement. The technology can capture details of an athlete’s actions in all directions and then reproduce a set of time-series freeze motions it can then present in a simulated 3D space. 

The system can simulate everything from sliding speed to flying height, landing distance and rotation angles in one image, allowing athlete performances to be compared side by side and revealing technical nuances frame by frame.