YinzCam CEO Priya Narasimhan Bullish On Computer-Vision Technology

(Courtesy of YinzCam)

The following interview is part of our ongoing Expert Series that asks C-level professionals, team presidents, league executives, athletic directors and other sports influencers about their latest thoughts and insights on new technologies impacting the sports industry.

Name: Priya Narasimhan

Company: YinzCam

Position: Founder/Chief Executive Officer

Priya Narasimhan is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of YinzCam, Inc., a company focused on data-driven mobile fan experiences and analytics-driven ROI for sports teams and leagues in the United States, Canada and Australia. She is also a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Narasimhan attended the University of California (Santa Barbara) where she completed her doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

1) Where does YinzCam fit into the mobile/technology community as it relates to its work with professional sports teams? What one area of the business are you focused on in 2017 and why?

YinzCam, essentially, develops the mobile fan-engagement platform that underlies about 160 different professional sports teams, leagues and venues in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the mobile platform is both an in-venue and out-of-venue experience. It includes a platform that has stats and media and in-venue utilities, a number of unique native features, as well as a number of third-party integrations. So we are often the prime integrator, and the primary developer of these mobile apps, providing both the in-venue and out-of-venue fan-facing features.

I would say there are a couple of areas. One would be on the fan-facing side of it, or an experience-type of thing like augmented reality (AR). We have had some success with the Cleveland Cavaliers doing an AR experience by allowing fans to virtually wear the NBA championship ring while the players got their rings, and now with their “Deep in the Q” app, which is an AR-enabled virtual pop-a-shot that allow fans to compete off-the-court against each other by shooting basketballs into a virtual hoop overlaid on different objects in the real world. We also worked with the Seattle Seahawks to launch an augmented-reality experience where fans around the world could “raise the (virtual) 12 flag” at the start of a game to participate in an iconic Seahawks tradition. We did an AR-enabled face-painting experience with the Denver Broncos to enable fans to virtually wear iconic face-masks to show their support for the team. So while we’ve developed a number of these different AR-enabled experiences already, I think that this is an area where we will really heavily focus our efforts and our creativity in 2017.

Why? Because our phones have faster processors, more memory and more storage in them, with cameras that can capture high-resolution images. The increased computational resources and advanced sensors (accelerometers, cameras, etc.) onboard our smartphones mean that we can support advanced real-time features (e.g., computer vision) on them that could only previously be done on servers. For instance, we can now have 360 video or virtual reality experiences on our mobile devices where the user is in control of the perspective of the video that he/she is viewing. So, there is clearly the opportunity to enhance the experience of fans in a really deep and interesting way on their own mobile devices. You’ve seen that with people playing with Pokémon Go and other things, but we are really taking that into the sports space, where we can use smartphones to detect recognizable symbols, recognizable attributes with athletes, teams and sponsors, and other game assets. How can we elevate that experience for the fan? I think that that’s one area that we are going to be focused on.

The second area is providing the fan with a personalized experience. We’ve long worked to develop a platform that allows teams to really tailor the app experience for fans by time and by location. So basically, teams can have cards (that represent content, utilities or perks) that surface up in their apps at the right time and the right location for fans, but now, we’d like to take that even further. We’d like to allow fans to personalize the app experience for themselves, essentially allowing each fan to have a unique version of their team app in their hands. This means that you and I could have the same team app, but it would look very different for both of us because it would be based on our individual preferences. So we are working on really getting down to teams to have that one-on-one personalized relationship with every fan, so that an app no longer looks the same across the board, but it truly reflects the fan’s personality, their preferences and their choices. How do we get there? Through a lot of data and automation behind the scenes. To actually drive that individualized experience requires a lot of backend data, analysis, machine-learning algorithms and other things to enable us to make sure that we deliver each fan exactly what they want and anticipate, at the right time and at the right location.

2) What one piece of technology are you particularly bullish on right now for how it can impact sports fans and why?

Computer vision combined with machine learning. So what does that mean? Computer vision is a scientific field that develops algorithms to detect and recognize stationary and moving three-dimensional objects from images and video, through a range of object features or attributes. Computers can be taught to recognize cans of beverages, lines on the field, human faces, along with human movements and poses. Traditionally, computer vision could only be done on high-end servers and could only be done offline, meaning that it would take a lot of time to process the images and the video to detect objects in them. 

Phones are so much more powerful today. I mean, the phone you hold in your hand has more computational power than the original Lunar Lander did. Today’s mobile devices make it possible to do computer-vision onboard them in a real-time way. So if you can have these computer-vision algorithms sitting in the palm of your hand, as you hold up your phone and capture images and video through your phone’s camera, you can detect different things in the real world in real-time. What a difference technology can make! You can actually do this on smartphones right now.. And if you marry the ability to run computer-vision algorithms on phones with machine learning, this means that as you detect objects, you can learn more about them, manipulate the objects in a personalized way and actually create interesting visualizations by involving other sources of data.

3) If money were no object, what technology would you build or buy to help you do your job better?

I think the technology that we would build or buy is the ability to do machine-learning algorithms at scale. Right now, with 45 million or more unique installs of our mobile apps, we sit on terabytes of data and analytics, but to crunch through that data and to look at it for insights, you have to throw a lot of servers at it, and that becomes very expensive in a hurry, which means we can afford to run those algorithms only on game-days or when a client requests it. What if you could have the benefit of a 24/7/365, living analytics storage computational facility that, as the data is coming in, it is continuously individualizing that experience for the fan, so that it’s not just on game days or selective points in time, but doing this personalization all the time? That’s the “if money were no object” part, to actually be able to crunch through every single byte of data that you are getting from all of the experiences, in real-time, to return something back to the fan in real time and to surprise, delight and gratify the fan in real time.

4) As a sports fan, what sports-related service, app, product, etc., could you not live without and why?

The things that I could not live without are my statistics and the visualizations of those statistics. I am an avid fan of being able to look at a play and slice and dice it in multiple ways. For example, shot charts for basketball, heat-maps for rugby, play visualization for football, etc. Seeing that a specific player tends to score most of his points from the left side of the court when facing a specific opponent. It’s stuff like that that gets me excited. Not just tables of statistics, but visualizations of statistics, being able to see that stuff and really say “Wow, I didn’t know that the game turned out that way and that these are the factors that influenced the game.” You know, those things that are in front of your eyes, but until somebody unearths that insight to you that through some kind of visualization, you don’t really realize what is going on.

I watch the shot chart all the time when watching my Pittsburgh Penguins, because I want to see where the most shots on goal were, when they face specific opponents, when specific line combinations occur. Were they on the left side or the right side? Where did they get through? That’s the kind of stuff that I absolutely love.

5) If you had to project 20 years into the future, how will most fans consume sports content?

Who knows if it’s even possible, but the ultimate thing will be when your home is your stadium and when you never have to leave your couch to feel like you are at the game in your seat in the stands. Imagine if teams could sell tickets for you to unlock that experience in your home, where your couch is your seat in the stadium and where you feel like there are people around you and you feel transported to the sights, sounds and emotions of being at the stadium right from your couch. You feel like you are watching the game live in the stands, but the environment providing that experience is all digitally rendered.

If you could really, really do that, where you never have to leave home in order to feel like you’re in the stadium and those two experiences blend seamlessly, whether it’s through holographic technology or other new technologies that are developed, that I think would be the ultimate. Your couch is your stadium; the stadium is where you are.

6) Give us your bold prediction about a form of technology that will move the needle when it comes to fan engagement, either in-arena or online, over the next 12 months and why?

I think a form of technology that will really move the needle in terms of fan engagement is using data to improve the experience. As much as I have talked about features like augmented reality and virtual reality — all those things, they excite the fan and they really inspire people — but one of the things that you need on a day-to-day basis is really being able to understand the fan and give them something that they want and that they care about, and that really comes from data.

So a form of technology that I think will move the needle is really building that aspirational thing — the 360-view of the fan that people have been talking about for years, but actually making it come to life and then using that to drive that personalized experience no matter what which digital platform you are on. Whether you’re on mobile, on desktop, your Apple Watch, your TV at home, it should just carry over seamlessly, in arena, out of arena, online. So omni-channel, data-driven digital and how we can actually get there; that, I think, in the next 12 months, is where we are going to see significant progress happen. If you do something on the desktop site, it should improve your mobile experience. If you do something on mobile, it should improve your wearable experience. All of those things should seamlessly carry over. It’s definitely a strong focus area for us, both short-term and in the long-term.