Blobman

Blobman is is a long story.I’ii give you the short version.

Back in the early 1990's a small group of Golf enthusiasts, Doctors, Professors,a BioMechanist and a PGA Golf Professional, gathered to delve into the intricacies of the Golf Swing.With the assistance of state of the art equipment of that era the Research began.

This group utilized The Ariel Performance Analysis System and the assitamce of Silicon Graphics, Inc (later braned SGI.APAS (Ariel Performance Analysis System) is a video-based 3D motion analysis system conceived and developed by Dr Gideon Ariel. Dr Ariel's system can capture video from multiple cameras simultaneously and perform a biomechanical analysis automatically.

SGI was an American manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, includingcomputer hardware and software.Founded in 1982 by Jim Clark, its initial market was 3D graphics display terminals, but its products, strategies and market positions evolved significantly over time. Early systems were based on the "Geometry Engine" that Clark and Marc Hannah had developed at Stanford University and were derived from Clark's broader background in computer graphics. The Geometry Engine was the first very large Scale Integration (VLSI) implementation of a geometry pipeline specialized hardware that accelerated the "inner-loop" geometric computations needed to display three deminsional images. The Indy Multimedia SGI work station was in part responisble for the success of Steven Spielberg's 1993 iconic motion picture "Juassic Park".The point is that the software and hardware used by this group was truly "state of the art" for the 1990"s.

The Hogan Swing that Shell's Wonderful World Golf broadcast in 1964was captured and shown at 90 frames at second which to the best of our knowlege the highest frame Rate video ever used to capture Mr Hogan's golf swing.This video is well known and available on YouTube and many other sources today.With the expertise of a very practiced and skilled biomechancist the data of this swing was sent to the programming department of SGI and they developed 3 dimensional model of Mr Hogan's golf swing.

The Programmers at SGI used the same technology to build the 3D Hogan model that they utilized to generate the 3D Dinosaur models for Jurassic Park.

With the use of the APAS Software and Hardware along with the Specialized collaboration of Silicon Graphics, Inc. this group was able to generate a reasonably accurate 3D Model of the Golf Swing Ben Hogan made on Shell's Wonderful World of Golf. It is from this model that The Blobman Protocol have been conceived.

This is version 2.0 of Blobman that was made available from the data we workfrom wedid at the BioMechanics Lab at The University of Nevada ar Reno

Features:

There was an effort to have a 3D appearance

Hide and Show Traces

Hide and Show Segments

Tutorial

Introduced “The Protractor”