Is the biggest ever innovation in cricket bats on the horizon?
Posted by Tom
Posted in Equipment News / General News / Other Brands / The Insiders
I’ve always been interested in cricket bat design, having been apart of the team behind the Fusion Skyer and later the Mongoose bat. So I keep a keen eye on developments and patent applications in this area. I also love the marketing and technology behind products, and am totally enamoured by the idea of technology revolutionising the game.
One of the buzz words in tech at the moment is gamification, whereby a company takes a product or service and turns it into a game thereby creating a community and a fun product people want to have. One of the most famous examples is the Nike + application, where you record distances run and compare them to friends and try to beat their time and improve your own. Cricket being such a statto’s game has great potential for a similar application.
So – when this patent application popped up last year from Essentialls99 (the guys behind Boom Boom) it got me all excited.
Patent Application WO/2011/110806 is for an ‘improved sports bat.’ which doesn’t sound so exciting in itself. However digging a little deeper it gets a lot more exciting.
The application looks to build on current technologies in cricket such as Hawk Eye and implement them into the bat, by way of sensors positioned along the bat.
By placing vibration sensors inside the bat, the inventors hope that the bat will record strikes and then this can be processed by the micro-processor cleverly hidden at the top of the handle. Using technology such as wifi and bluetooth this could then transfer the data of the shots made and the power used to create a chart. It could potentially improve coaching, as well producing gamification and even helping umpires out with edges.
The data could also be used by manufacturers of cricket bats, to find out where the majority of players strike the ball and shapes could be optimized to produce more power for the players.
The possibilities are endless and even if the technology is there, there’s always the guardians of the game, the MCC standing in the way. But take a look at some of these screenshots and just have a think at how revolutionary such a bat could be, in way of marketing, technological improvements to the bat, coaches and also improving the decision making of umpires. It’s truly exciting.
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- A USB connector in the handle
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- Sensors on the edges, checking for edges
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- Sensors on the cricket bat
8 thoughts on “Is the biggest ever innovation in cricket bats on the horizon?”
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cool. maybe they could place the sensors under the stickers.
I can see this as being the most expensive bat in the world !
Unless the idea is refined, I just can’t see the MCC letting this one in. It’s a fantastic concept.
How can you claim a patent on something PitchVision have been doing for 5 years???!!?!?!?! ha ha ha!
Did Pitchvision install sensors into a cricket bat? If so do you have a link to their product?
Pitchvision don’t have an instrumented bat. Interesting to see though on their website that they now have a fielding practice system. We built a prototype for Derek Randall back in 2004.
On the subject of this patent though. While it is possible to do in theory. I doubt it would ever be practical to make a mass-market product. Too expensive, and also doubts on accuracy and durability. Although if you throw enough money at something….but do they have that? Never say never though, but I think not this one.
Prof Gerald Nurick of University of Capetown did some research in 1999 with an instrumented bat to look at impact location for quantifying the effects of coaching. Very much a lab tool, which started to break down after 180 overs with academy players. It used a grid of piezo sensors on the face of the bat. They considered triangulation from an array on the back of the bat[as proposed by this patent], but concluded that varying willow properties between bats will affect time-of-flight of the signal. Using this method you would have to customise for every bat.
I would be interested to know what information this sensor bat would be able to deliver that you can’t get from our impact sheets which have been on the market for the last 18 months. The impact sheets also have the benefit of being inexpensive and are able to be used with the batsman’s existing bat.
PitchVision do have a fully instumented ‘smart-bat’ and its supposed to be comming out this year (heard via a friend who works in their India office). dont know if that helps: but agree it would require some clever smarts to pull it off. Durability would be the main issue: who would buy a smart bat if it only lasted 1 season?