To avoid having to practice to become a better basketball player is staggering. The engineer has created a basketball hoop that travels at 100 mph across a room to make sure the ball always goes through the hoop.
We have been covering the arms race for a few years now, as Wighton tries to beat him with more complex ways to put a ball through a hoop. It started with a curved backboard that was designed with many computer simulations to make sure the ball didn't go through the hoop, but eventually it was upgraded to a moving backboard that tracked the trajectory of the ball and angle the board to make sure it didn't go through the Both solutions required players to hit the backboard, which led to the creation of a basketball hoop that could be moved on a wall. Someone with hoop dreams might not be able to hit a wall.
A custom-built lightweight basketball hoop made of aluminum, foam, and fiber glass can fly around a room in 3D space thanks to a complex pulley system powered by six electric motor.
This absurd creation required considerable levels of engineering to succeed, including everything from a custom designed brake system that could stop all six motors in a heartbeat, to a foam basketball that was carved out on a machine.
He switched to a series of motion capture cameras that tracked both the position and orientation of the back after using a Microsoft Kinect to visually track the trajectory of every shot. The ball is also tracked with 100 times more accuracy.
When all of the bugs and issues are worked out, it is amazing, but the system doesn't take full advantage of all the power the six electric motor offer. The pulley system it relies on being torn from the wall in the process of intercepting a basketball could be damaged if the backboard hits speeds of up to 250MPH. A player doesn't want to find themselves between the backboard and the ball at any point, as it's all but guaranteed they'll be benched and on the injured list for a long time.
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