Smash a birdie overhead and the bottom-heavy badminton shuttlecock won鈥檛 stay aloft for long, especially if it comes off the racquet at 300 kilometres an hour.
As fast as it flies off the strings, a shuttle loses half its speed every few feet. It moves fastest right at contact, but pinpointing that precise moment is hard to do without the kind of sophisticated, high-tech radar seen on the international competitive circuit.
So how fast is fast? 麻豆传媒映画engineer and app developer Edward Li intends to put a low-fi, accessible version of this radar into the hands of millions of worldwide badminton players so they can calculate their own personal bests and compare their single-shot velocity against friends, opponents and players around the globe.
鈥淎 recreational player would definitely use this,鈥� said Li, who competes in regional open tournaments. 鈥淭hey might have a party to see who has got the fastest smash, and the winner gets bragging rights.鈥�
Li's team is聽 to finish the project on time.
The competitive spirit isn鈥檛 limited to one-upmanship with your doubles partner. A player at the 麻豆传媒映画Racquets Club near Hillcrest Park can see how her fastest jump shot compares to any other app user, from Richmond to Shanghai.聽
鈥淵ou can actually make friends across continents because, with this app, you can share your speed with someone else and they can say, 鈥榃ell, I can do it a little bit better,鈥欌�� said Li.
Fast, faster, fastest
As shown by baseball鈥檚 off-speed hurlers and knuckleballers, speed isn鈥檛 the only factor in throwing a strike-out pitch. A winning badminton shot is similarly complex.
鈥淭he smash is an important part of badminton, but speed is just one part of what makes a good smash. In baseball, the fastest pitcher in the world is not the best in the world, so the fastest smasher is not necessarily the best player,鈥� said Li.
One of the world鈥檚 most consistently blisteringly fast hitter is Mohammad Ahsan, an Indonesian men鈥檚 doubles specialist whose jump smash was recorded at 385 km/h at Germany鈥檚 Bitburger Open in the fall. His shot wasn鈥檛 returned, but the opposition did get a racket to the bird.
鈥淚t does slow down very quickly and that is why your opponent is able to return it,鈥� said Li. 鈥淭he good thing about badminton is it doesn鈥檛 matter how fast your opponent smashes, the chances are you can return because all you need to do is put your racket in front of it and it will bounce back. It鈥檚 extremely frustrating for the other side, and it is a very good feeling for the person who is returning. Otherwise it would be a very short game.鈥�
Talk about development
One shot isn鈥檛 everything, but competitive spirit reigns, and Li believes there are other uses for the app.
鈥淪ome coaches would use [the app] to gauge the smash speed. It鈥檚 a tool,鈥� he said.
Calvin Holoboff, a world masters champion and six-time national masters winner who coaches badminton at the 麻豆传媒映画Racquets Club, said the Shuttle Speed app could serve a niche, social function but not necessarily for elite competitors who reply on more than speedy kill shots.
鈥淭hey used radar guns in the past but for coaching badminton, it doesn鈥檛 really come into it,鈥� he said. 鈥淏ut there are always badminton fanatics out there that might want to buy something like that to just see how fast they smash. There might be the odd pro, too. It could catch on. It鈥檚 a novelty.鈥�
鈥淚 see a use on the development side and just for fun,鈥� said Alvin Lau, the manager of sport development for Badminton BC. He said the app could contribute to the sport鈥檚 popularity through demonstrations and skill competitions, something the provincial sport organization has tried to do using radar to replicate the exact function now offered by the app.
鈥淲e measured the speed of smashes for fun at demos,鈥� said Lau. 鈥淲e even brought in and borrowed a police radar gun, but because the shuttle was travelling too fast or was too small, we couldn鈥檛 get an accurate reading. It would show something ridiculously slow like 40 km/h. At a higher level, the average smash speed is 250 and a hard one is in the 300 range.鈥�
A broader use of technology is also how badminton coaches can boost training methods and technical development, said Lau.
鈥淚n our sport with the development of coaches, we鈥檙e trying to catch up to sports like hockey and soccer. They use a wide variety of apps to aid in coaching, and this is a way I think all coaches should be going. In addition to a clip board and stop watch, you could have programs on your iPad.鈥�
Such simple feedback could help new players develop basic skills, he said, if coaches are 鈥渁ble to measure the smash to say your attack is not up to that level or standard yet.鈥�
Agile thinking
To create the Shuttle Speed app, Li, who picked up the sport as a student at Eric Hamber secondary in the mid-70s, worked with a small team that included algorithm and software developers as well as a marketer dedicated to reaching millions of Chinese players.
The app works by using a smartphone camera to film a player hitting or serving the shuttle. The app has less than 200 milliseconds to capture the birdie鈥檚 irregular, decelerating flight. It measures the birdie鈥檚 speed at various points and then uses an algorithm to calculate the initial speed at impact.
In another baseball analogy, Li said that unlike a pitch off the mound, the speed of a shuttle off a racket drops rapidly. To calculate the speed off the racquet strings, the developers created an algorithm to measure the shuttle鈥檚 speed as it slowed down during its flight. Using that information, they could then calculate its velocity at the launch.
鈥淭he baseball doesn鈥檛 really slow down from the time it leaves the pitcher鈥檚 hand, but that is not the case for a shuttle,鈥� said Li. 鈥淚t slows down immediately. So when it鈥檚 trying to capture it, you鈥檝e got a speed at time one, and then time two, and then another speed at time three 鈥� which speed do you actually use?鈥�
This development started more than two years ago for an app that will sell for less than seven dollars and is on track for a winter Android release with an iOS release to follow in the spring.
The first app Li developed was also designed to measure badminton performance. It analyzed footwork and counted 20,000 downloads. The engineer named his firm LingBu Badminton for a phrase he remembered from his childhood.
鈥淲hen I was young, I read a number of these martial arts novels and in one of these novels there was this type of kung fu which taught people how to escape from harm without fighting. The name of this particular technique is called ling bu. It means agile steps. This is what I named my first app, which was about footwork, and the name stuck.鈥�
Badminton is a game of agility, speed, strategy and endurance. Li was drawn to it because there鈥檚 no contact and it doesn鈥檛 require exceptional physical strength. Also a social sport, millions worldwide play badminton in court settings, on beaches and in backyards with friends and family.
鈥淎 lot of time we play doubles and you cannot play constantly,鈥� said Li, 鈥渟o when you sit down, you have time to chat.鈥�
And now, also compare smash speeds.
Twitter:
