Never mind the final Super Bowl score (and the unfortunate headlines), did you appreciate those slick digital field overlays like the yellow 1st & ten line? Frankly I’m still impressed with this technology even though it’s not magic. HowStuffWorks explains pretty well the sensors, geometry, and video processing required to make that virtual line look like it’s painted on the field. All it takes is precise knowledge of where the camera and line markers are in a 3D model of the stadium, plus the use of the turf color as a reverse mask so that the players — who must never wear the same shade of green — don’t get overlaid. But once you understand that, the new LiveLine info inserted into America’s Cup video seems practically impossible…

I spent some time recently looking through the wonderful photography AC34 is making available to the media (the public can browse large thumbnails). Most of the images were taken by the superb shooter Gilles Martin-Raget, and I thank him for taking some that illustrate my story obessions with the underlying technology and the support fleet. Like the one above which frames the intense racing with the AC45’s space-age boomkin. As described in November that gray disk most aft is a NovAtel high-precision GPS which works along with inertial motion sensors and a high speed wireless data network so that the entire AC system knows exactly where this boat is…