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Case Study: KANSHI BlockS Pro

Streaming real-time video of Japanese badminton matches

Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology

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Compact design, durability, and high functionality prove to be worthwile

To provide support for Japanese badminton players, a team of researchers headed by Dr. Mitsugu Kakuta and postgraduate student Takeshi Yamamoto of the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering is conducting empirical research using sports video. They have developed a system for filming matches at international competitions, while delivering the video to a client machine located in the venue in real-time.
A camera located in the venue takes a video of the players playing on the court, and the video data is then sent to a compact desktop server connected via LAN. The server receives and stores the video, and at the same time, the video is delivered to a client machine (notebook computer) managed by members of the Japanese team. The video sent to the server is converted to the required format, and delivered to the client machine as soon as it is loaded to the server.

Monitoring the destination client machine

The users of the client machine that receives the video include both members of the research team and individuals not familiar with computers or networks. So if the client machine has a problem, the users may not be able to restore the network by themselves. Dr. Kakuta implemented KANSHI BlockS™ Pro for alive monitoring of the system, so if a problem occurs, he can contact the user of the client machine by mobile phone and instruct the user to reboot the computer, for example.

Ubiquitous computing

Because the operating environment is a gymnasium where badminton matches are held, the research team needed a monitoring system that was portable and highly environmentally-resistant to dust and other conditions. In addition, it was essential that the monitoring system has the processing capability to respond to the high speed of badminton matches, in which the initial speed of the shuttlecock can be higher than 300 km/h.

"Alive monitoring is one of the systems that support smooth network operations. It is important that we are able to perform IP level alive monitoring in an easy manner. It also provides an effective means of quickly creating a solid system configuration. KANSHI BlockS™ Pro has a low profile, but it is the foundation of the system. Even if the system has the proper communication application software, a network with an unstable foundation is useless. KANSHI BlockS Pro addresses these needs." (Dr. Kakuta)

Dr. Kakuta is currently looking into how to use the flexible open source operating system SSD/Linux, installed to KANSHI BlockS™ Pro, to use it for simple portal site operations for delivering information during matches.