Eye on the future

摘要

Armchair cricket fans thrilled by this summer's Ashes series will also have enjoyed the benefits of a technology that has revolutionised televised sport. Hawkeye, the advanced image-processing technology that predicts the flight of a cricket ball to within millimetres, was born in the leafy Hampshire idyll that houses one of the UK's most prolific R&D centres. A wholly owned subsidiary of Siemens since 1991, Roke Manor Research has existed in one form or another since the 1950s. It was founded by Plessey and developed Ptarmigan, the Army's communications system that is still in use today.