14-SPORTS / SUNDAY. MAY 23. 1993 / DAILY NEW
Computer basketball
talks trash and plays rough
 
By Eric Noland Daily News Staff Writer
One of the most obvious applications of the virtual reality boom is the video game, and a small New York company has broken from the trend of gun battles and karate kicks to develop a truly interactive basketball game.
Corporate Communication Group has produced "Jump Shot," in which a participant goes one-on-one with a computerized opponent who can play rough and talk tough.
The participant puts on a light cotton glove that is a color not found in his clothing. He then
stands in front of a large blue screen and watches a large adjacent monitor much like a TV weather­man.
On the monitor he sees himself, plus the opponent, the floor, the hoop and a ball. One computer tracks the motion of his gloved hand for dribbling and shooting movements, another handles graphic control.
"We're tracking color," said CCG owner Tim O'Donnell. "When you throw a ball, your hand moves and sort of stops. Our algo­rithms say, 'OK, follow his hand, and when it stops, throw the ball in the direction it was going.' The computer knows if you were throwing it hard or soft or high or low. It's been following you every milli­second."
The system is so new that it's dis­played only on a limited basis — this summer, at the Liberty Science Museum in Jersey City, NJ. Its de­velopers are searching for a corpo­rate sponsor — an athletic shoe would be a natural — to offer wider availability in health clubs and high-tech arcades.
Its prospects are reflected in the fact people lined up for an hour-and-a-half to play it during its exhi­bition at a science museum in Phil­adelphia last month.

 
O'Donnell said much of the popularity centers around the fact the opponents (choice of two. Iceman and Slammer) are based on real people.
"You're actually playing this guy. You have to head-fake him out of the way. He'll block your shot. He'll steal the ball and take his own shot."

O'Donnell's lofty vision for the system includes a fiber-optic link of participants in two different cities: You stand in front of a blue screen in a room at your health club and link up with a friend in Boston who is in a similar facility. Both of you appear on a video screen in each lo­cale and the games begin — basket­ball, racquetball, handball, whatev­er.

In fact, such a hook-up was achieved between Anaheim and New Orleans last November with a forerunner of "Jump Shot."
Originally designed to promote the products of a pharmaceutical client, the CCG game linked trade shows in both cities and had doc­tors wildly hurling computerized drugs at calcium ions, for example, to block them from getting to smooth muscle tissue.
"The advantage we wanted in this system," O'Donnell said, "was to get rid of the equipment (head­sets, wired gloves, etc.) and just play."
He pondered a few more possi­bilities, chuckled and went on: "We could use real people and put their own traits in. Abdul-Jabbar does a hook shot. Try to block it."
Sure. Bat off Roger Clemens. Play a set of tennis with Steffi Graf. Go a few rounds with Michael Nunn. Hunker down in the net against a Penguins power play.
Someday, it may be as simple as picking a sport and stepping up to the blue screen.