Each Olympics is full of not only physical achievements, but technological advances as well. For the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, NBC Sports has several innovative camera gadgets to help make coverage more exciting and easier to grasp.
Veteran NBC camera guru Garrett Brown and colleagues have come up with the following camera inventions to enhance coverage of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics:
- Tiny HD “lipstick cams” will be placed on the athletes themselves to provide POV shots
- The submerged “Dive Cam” will shoot down a plastic tube to capture the point of impact from the high dive
- The “Sky Cam” will capture rowers and kayakers from far above the water course
- GPS and digital course maps will be deployed to help viewers keep track of athletes progress on longer events
David Neal, NBC’s executive vice president in charge of Olympics coverage, told the Star Tribune “For us, it’s all about making sports easier to understand. But the best technical innovations are the ones that take the viewer on a magic carpet ride. They transport the television viewer out of their easy chair at home and give them a sense of what it’s like to be on the field of play.”
NBC plans on providing 3,600 hours of Olympic coverage from 35 venues in Beijing.
The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics start August 8th.
