Associate Professor Rob Aughey - FIFA Project Lead (ISEAL Victoria University)
So this project is unique in many ways. It's the largest project of its type ever conducted anywhere in the world. It's a privilege to be involved.
FIFA is really interested in coming up with minimum standards for athlete tracking technology. That's the electronic performance tracking systems. It's all about tracking athletes on the soccer pitch.
We've got partners also with Football Federation Australia, who are tracking the referees and testing their video assistant referee technology. And we have 19 matches that we're putting on in 10 days.
So to establish how well these systems work, you really need to be able to compare them to a gold standard.
So we're using a computer vision model where we can get precise location information of players on the soccer pitch, and we're then able to compare each of the manufacturers against that gold standard.
Nicholas Evans - Quality Programme Group Leader (Football Technology Innovation Division FIFA)
FIFA is looking to understand how the use of this technology can help the game of football, particularly what data can provide, what value added it can give from a tactical and medical point of view.
The reason why we chose to come to Melbourne was based on a long process of about 12 to 18 months, determining the specific needs of the game of football.
We chose Victoria University after a long selection process, since they offered us a good mix of a very practical solution to achieve what we're looking at, a full-scale analysis of their football game.
But otherwise really the practical research approach of the university convinced us to select this university for the trials. This is a very important project for us. FIFA obviously is one of the leading sport organisations in the world.
And as Australia's leading sports university, we look forward to partnering with similar organisations all around the world, because that really gives us an edge in terms of practising the science that we apply to real life.
It will help improve the game. It will help make games better. It will make them more attractive. And therefore, I'm really pleased to be at this starting point, of something that could have a potentially big impact on, on the game.
