- Data Points
Using Maps and Data Vis to Understand Tennis
These striking visualizations of tennis matches show what we can learn from sports tracking data.
Data Points is a new series in which we explore the world of data visualization, information graphics, and cartography.
Using visualization to understand sports goes at least as far back as when Eadweard Muybridge used photography to prove that a galloping horse completely leaves the ground.
With the rise of optical tracking, biometric sensors, and big data analysis, a new wave of technology is transforming what we know about sports performance. Basketball follows every player with cameras mounted on the ceiling. Baseball tracks every pitch and the speed and trajectory of batted balls. Soccer can tell us where players move, and how far they've run during a match. The professional tennis tour, which is hosting the U.S. Open this month, has been slower to embrace tracking, despite close sponsorship relationships with technology companies like IBM and SAP.
Yet
