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Spot the Ball
- _alastair 11y agoI'm one of the people that made this interactive - funny to see it on Hacker News! If anyone has any questions about it, let me know.
- corbinpage 11y agoHow do you construct the background image that replaces the ball?
- rwc 11y agoSuspect they used Photoshop Content Aware Fill. http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/content-aware-fill-cs5/ http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/content-awa...
- _alastair 11y agoThat's the work of Sam Manchester, deputy editor on the Sports desk and chief Photoshop wizard. I believe most of it is just cloning different parts of the photo to cover up the ball, though it can get more complex. For example, on the 4th photo of this previous round: http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot-the-ball/2014/06/17 http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot... he actually cloned a players face from a different photo and pasted it in to cover up the ball. I have no idea how he does it so well.
- taternuts 11y agoI was wondering how he did that one!!! Part of my thinking was that you'd choose pictures that had the ball in an easy to photoshop location, and that threw me off
- _alastair 11y agoI think he enjoys a challenge. Case in point, the last photo in this set: http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot-the-ball/2014/06/19 http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot...
- mgkimsal 11y agoMaybe there's a way I just can't find, but it would be handy to be able to toggle everything 'off' again to get back to the original ball-less image.
- BillTheCat 11y agoSports photographers also take many shots in rapid succession. I bet you could clone the background from a shot a half second before the one in the article.
- edgall 11y agoIf you look at the third picture, the guy in green is cloned and blended in where the ball is meant to be.
- hockeybias 11y agoIf the goal was to generate frustration, it worked with me. Quit halfway through...
- ehmorris 11y agoVery interesting to see the density of others' guesses. It doesn't seem to show every other guess though — how do you choose which ones to show?
- _alastair 11y agoCorrect, it doesn't render all clicks (I dread to think how browsers would react if I tried) - all the results are put through a k-means cluster analysis at regular intervals to produce approximately 30 visible results. The percentages are calculated relative to all the clicks, though.
- Serow225 11y agoNifty. So do each of the guesses shown account for a roughly equal number of clustered clicks, or do some of them aggregate more clicks than others?
- dangrossman 11y agoWhat am I doing wrong? Clicking and dragging the "drag this" has no effect. Nothing moves or changes in Chrome 43.
- basseq 11y agoSame problem: worked in IE (!) though.
- _alastair 11y agoOh, damn. I think you've found a bug, sorry about that. I think it's expecting a touch event when it shouldn't be. Let me take a look at that. EDIT: should be fixed now. Apologies again, embarrassing bug caused by a last minute bug fix. The way these things always go...
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- Pyrodogg 11y agoYep. Chrome on a Surface Pro 3. Doesn't react to click events, only worked if I actually touched my screen.
- bhhaskin 11y agoSame here.
- w-ll 11y agoTry with the stylus, I could be wrong but last time i played with a Surface Pro, I noticed that using your fingers on the touch screen game touchEvents and using the stylus gave mouseEvents.
- brianshaler 11y agoRe-opened to test in Chrome on Ubuntu (XPS13dev) and to my astonishment, touch events worked!
- h1fra 11y agoVery cool, even for a non sporty person. Interactive, fun and not too complicated. Really liked this idea
- ak39 11y agoHow long does it take to "hide" the ball per pic?
- vlasev 11y agoOne possible way of generating such images is to use more images since a lot of sport photos seem to be taken as part of a burst sequence. All you need is two such photos where the ball has moved over enough and the rest shouldn't be difficult.
- smeyer 11y agoBut won't the players have moved roughly as much as the ball from photo to photo (since they're moving at about the same speed)? I suppose as long as the players haven't moved into the space where the ball used to be you could still trivially use that space to replace the ball in an earlier image.
- jessaustin 11y agoThis is a guess but maybe if they have multiple moving objects they just figure out which one is shaped like a ball?
- Swizec 11y agoHow do you calculate accuracy? Sometimes I clicked in almost the opposite corner of the ball and it said I did better than 80% of readers. Are you just calculating how close my guess is to the most densely clicked spot even if the ball is not actually in that spot?
- _alastair 11y agoThe accuracy is calculated compared to other readers, so if you all clicked on the wrong corner you can still be better than 80% of them! I mostly did it this way because there's no hard number that makes sense here - we don't know ft/metres, and pixels aren't a unit everyone is used to thinking about.
- wooyi 11y agoDo you know if these kinds of interactive content perform better (ie clicks/shares/views) vs other forms, ie longform or just plain data visualization pieces? I personally enjoyed it a lot.
- _alastair 11y agoThis isn't really my area of expertise - we have people at the company dedicated to studying this kind of thing in far more detail than I know how, who may end up reading this - hi! - so I don't want to speak out of turn. But in my experience there's a lot of variation - things like this interactive aren't as tied to the news cycle as many articles are, so it won't peak as high but may make up for it in longer term traffic.
- danso 11y agoHow did Maureen Dowd do on it?
- _alastair 11y agoI'm trying to come up with a good joke for this, Dan, and I'm failing. So I will tell you that last year Nicholas Kristof scored a respectable 54%: https://www.facebook.com/nytimes/posts/10150426093994999 https://www.facebook.com/nytimes/posts/10150426093994999
- pervycreeper 11y agoWhat was the concept behind this, and what is interesting about it?
- _alastair 11y agoThanks for the question, pervycreeper! The concept is not new at all - Spot the Ball is a competition that ran in UK (and possible other) newspapers going back at least as far as the 70s. It was a cash prize competition and was pretty popular, though it's died out in recent years. I wanted to bring it back to get people to interact a little more with a highlights photo gallery - it's a lot more fun that way. IMO, it's interesting because it's just the right level of infuriating.
- pervycreeper 11y agoInteresting, thanks. Definitely a tradition which is very well suited to revamping for the digital age.
- pvg 11y agoHere's a mention of it in the 40s in VS Naipaul's autobiographical fiction. https://books.google.com/books?id=A2bTQbKZRf0C&lpg=PA110&ots=QRKQI8v3O-&dq=spot%20the%20missing%20ball&pg=PA109#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=A2bTQbKZRf0C&lpg=PA110&ots...
- keithpeter 11y agoEarly 1960s: Grandad tried the intersecting eyelines approach, Dad did the grid of guesses approach (you got a number of guesses). Neither won much!
- DanBC 11y agoOne thing that people don't realise about newspaper spot the ball competitions is that the winning position was not where the ball originally was in the photo, but where the competition organisers thought it should be. That removed any actual element of skill ("where are the players looking?") and turned it into pure guesswork. People could buy rubber stamps of a grid of crosses so they could make very many simultaneous guesses.
- rattray 11y agoI wanted to ask how long it took to make this, but that's an impossible thing to answer - so how much lead time did you (and the team) have before the first version went live?
- _alastair 11y agoI just checked my e-mail - it looks like we decided that we were definitely going to do it approximately two weeks before the first round went live. That's not typical but not necessarily unusual, if that's a sentence that even makes sense.
- dzhiurgis 11y agoAre you going to share analytical results? Like, does countries who adore football, score higher. Do IPs who regularly read NY Times sports section score better? Or people who actually seen the game on TV, do they score better?
- Omnipresent 11y agoWould love to find out more about how it was made. Can you point to a small example of how to accomplish this? seems so cool!
- jmhobbs 11y agoThis is infuriating. I tried using where players were looking and it got me squat. Very cool though.
- jpreiland 11y agoYeah I found that the players' eyes were mostly useless but often times the composition of the photo is helpful. For example, if players are gathered on the right edge of the frame and there's a bunch of blank space to the left, the ball is likely over in the open area
- ars 11y agoI used where the fans were looking instead. It worked sometimes. I assume the players look where they are going, and at other people instead of the ball (since they can predict the trajectory they probably look where it will interact with something, not where it is.).
- bherms 11y agoreminds me of bestofthebest's car raffle... since you can't really gamble in the UK, they do a skill based game that is exactly this... you buy guesses and then click where you think the ball is... the person each week with the closest guess to where a group of judges says the ball is wins the car of their choice
- knodi123 11y agoa group of judges? but... isn't there one objective correct answer?
- thaumasiotes 11y agoWhat fun is that?
- bherms 11y agoYeah, I'm confused as to why they need judges as well, but it's how they do it...
- phaemon 11y ago> since you can't really gamble in the UK Of course you can really gamble in the UK - that's what the bookies are for. However, the regulations are a lot tighter for gambling, so it's easier to make it a "skill based game" which has much looser rules. Bingo and raffles have their own rules which, again, are a lot easier to comply with.
- Zenst 11y agoIndeed I recall Spot the Ball compititions in the national papers in my youth and nicely covered here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot_the_ball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot_the_ball in much better detail than I. So somewhat nostalgic seeing the new edition. Though recall it's demise in newspapers was down to the worry of technology enabling analysis of the picture reducing the human level of skill involved and with it being money related prizes then they moved on.
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- 8_hours_ago 11y agoJohn Graham-Cumming wrote an article about trying to hack a contest similar to this. I wonder if a similar technique could be used to find the ball on these images? http://blog.jgc.org/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-myself-aston.html http://blog.jgc.org/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-myself...
- danso 11y agoI started to roll my eyes when I saw your comment because I thought, "the NYT made a fun web interactive with no-stakes and someone is pointlessly wondering if the answers are in the source code"...so now I realize what a reflection this is on how lame and limited my own thinking is :). This was a great link...I've been casually brainstorming heuristics for detecting possible Photoshopping and John writes about exactly that. I'm going to walk through his algorithm using Python and PIL.
- smackfu 11y agoNeat idea, but is this something you can actually be skilled at? Even if you know the game, and can figure out what trajectory the ball was on, it seems very hard to figure out exactly where on that trajectory it was when the photo was taken, given the high speed of the ball.
- blazingfrog2 11y agoAfter logging many thousand of hours of dutifully watching soccer (over 30 years of full-on love for the game), I was able to match the given situations to similar ones I'd seen before and get close enough most of the time. It's still all probabilities at the end of the day. Following the direction players are looking is just one parameter and can be wildly inaccurate without any information on the angle and velocity of the ball at the time of the shot. One of the trickiest situations is when 2 players jump for the ball, usually coming from a goalkeeper's clearance, so high and fairly fast, and collide in the air (often closing their eyes): the ball could literally be anywhere.
- emodendroket 11y agoCouldn't you? It seems like if you were skilled enough you could figure it out by the reactions of various players in the photos with more than one or two people in them.
- jdrock 11y agoTrying to triangulate based on where players' eyes are looking rarely works. In many cases, the goalie is looking in a completely different direction than where the ball is. I guess that's why they're getting scored on.
- blazingfrog2 11y agoDon't forget that the ball can come very fast and the keeper will need a split second to adjust. In other cases, the kicker can be masked by another player preventing the keeper to see the ball until very late.
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- hackuser 11y agoIt's odd to see a casual game, with no other significance or meaning, in the NY Times. It would be great to see them using interactive tools to tell news stories more often.
- emodendroket 11y agoThey do that too. Like the story they did about the Philippine Coast Guard in the South China Sea.
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- Klinky 11y agoNext they'll be putting crossword puzzles in the New York Times! Of all places!
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- tabrischen 11y agoThis is very fun for me, even as someone who's not a sports fan. Great way to engage this other segment of readers.
- mholt 11y agoDid anyone actually read the article?
- DLWormwood 11y agoI remember seeing an arcade redemption machine that worked on the same principle. It had a database of hundreds of screenshots from soccer/footy games and the player had to guess where the ball should be. The more accurate the guess; the more tickets the machine dispensed.
- usaphp 11y agoIf you notice the outline of the ball has different size for each photo, this allows to identify a relative distance where the ball is compared to height of players
- _alastair 11y agoGlad you noticed that! It's proof of the difference a great designer (in this case, Rumsey Taylor of our News Design team) can make. As a developer it can be quite humbling to realise how many seemingly tiny yet actually really important touches exist in a project you think you know inside out.
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- _puk 11y agoGood fun! My understanding of the UK version of this was that the ball was actually placed by a group of pundits[0], rather than being in the original location, so even if you found a freeze frame of the original match you'd still not be able to cheat the system. Would be fun to crowd source a position taken from wrong guesses to provide some variance. 0: http://www.theguardian.com/football/shortcuts/2015/jan/14/how-to-spot-the-ball-in-spot-the-ball http://www.theguardian.com/football/shortcuts/2015/jan/14/ho...
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y agoI like that - a "most popular guess" vs "actual position" would be really interesting. As we seem to have at least one of the developers in this thread, maybe we can make that happen (or at least a post-mortem blog post analysing the data?)
- namuol 11y agoFor me this quickly became "spot the photoshop artifact". I only noticed it clearly for one photo and did marginally better than average (58% -- some guesses were way off) Still very fun.
- reamworks 11y agoThis is _much_ more fun that drawing graphs about poor people and college.
- Rexxar 11y agoThe second time, after removing the cookie, is much more easy (~46% to 99.67%). The conclusion is that there are, for the moment, few cheaters.
- ChrisArchitect 11y agoas a footy fan I enjoy this a lot - tho this time around I scored terribly compared to world cup a year ago thanks _alastair for getting involved here - tons of great little insights