App Lets Bowlers Track Their Rolls With Their Smartphone Camera

Track My Roll is an app designed to help bowlers track how, and how fast, the ball rolls down the lane. Using the built-in camera on any iPhone or Android device, the app allows bowlers to map the direction and speed their balls take — a potentially effective tool in knowing how to orient themselves to optimize the chances of bowling a strike.

The app is the creation of Dynamic Data Applications, a software company in Allentown, Penn., founded by software engineer Jerry Petrole Jr., who is also an avid bowler and bowling coach, the app’s website explains. Last summer, it raised $3,499 on Kickstarter, nearly $1,000 over its funding goal for the production of the iOS app. The Android version was developed later.

“I really wanted to contribute something to the bowling world that was my very own,” Petrole Jr. said on the Bowling This Month podcast in May. “I’m a software developer by trade, I’m a bowling coach, and so those two things made it natural for me to want to do something technical.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the technical aspect of bowling, with quantifying the things that happen on the lane.”

The app instructs bowlers to build their profiles, including their handedness (right handedness is assumed; left handedness can be selected) and the bowling balls they have at their disposal. Tracking works by taking a video of the roll at 30 frames per second, as the website suggests, with an obstructed view of the lane boundaries and the ball.

To track the roll, the bowler then selects this video of that roll, makes any manual adjustments to the lane boundaries to ensure accuracy, and then the app’s computer vision and object tracking capabilities take over. The result is a visual overlay of the ball’s path and a panel with information about that specific roll —time, date, type of ball, the breakdown of the ball’s path by boards (on the lane) and feet, launch and entry angles, average speed, and the point at which the ball diverged from its relatively straight path.

According to Petrole Jr., the app is designed with the common bowler in mind — “anyone who is interested in seeing their shot path from a different perspective, demystifying the myth of what we think we see on the lane and what is actually happening, and putting some numbers to that.

“Coaches have really liked it…The so-called bowling geeks tend to really like it, and anyone, really anyone who wants some extra information that can add to their game can benefit from this,” Petrole Jr. said.

This data can be saved to a set of rolls, downloaded to the phone, or shared on social media, email or text message. If the lane boundaries were off from the beginning, the person taking the video can stop the playback and retry with the more accurately defined lane.

The app is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for $20.