Funny how this works so well for football yet is so incredibly annoying for hockey.

I wonder how well it would work today though. The glow was a bit... off... but more modern technology could perhaps make the puck stand out more, while ditching the trail when it goes super fast.

You can see in that little clip the Hockey implementation was distractingly poor, the blue glow wasn't properly centered and the red streak was drawn on top of players in the foreground, it was all just way too bright and unnatural looking.

Plus I'm guessing is it's actually kind of fun as a hockey viewer to keep your eye on the puck and try to follow it. That's not really the case with the first down marker.

They used something this (except with infra red paint (Im guessing infra red light absorbing paint)) to change advertising on the boards for the "world cup of hockey" this year and it was still annoying - anything that moves that should not be moving is very visible.

Hockey is much better on TV in HD than it was a couple of years ago so I understand what FOX were after, but it sure did not work. It must be the camera panning much faster in hockey that makes this kind of trick difficult to pull off well.

I'd love it if they could paint a virtual shadow on the ground directly below high balls in rugby, football etc so you have some indication of depth. Guessing it is pretty tricky to know the ball's coordinates with sufficient accuracy.

That soccer one at 3:26 - I thought that was a canvas laid on the ground, printed to look 3D from the perspective of the main camera. Does it vary or is one of us wrong?

The hockey puck glow was a bit weird, but actually pretty good for a few scenarios:

It is rather difficult for people who haven't seen much hockey to follow the puck. As you watch more of the sport, you figure out cues that help you track it, but I think that is a legitimate barrier that presents some difficulty in getting new fans of the sport. I think the blue glow helped a lot with that; would be nice if individual viewers could opt in our out of it on the fly. That would have been impossible (or prohibitively expensive) before, but with streaming video looking like the future rather than set channels it will be more workable.

When the puck travels close to the boards on the near side of the rink, it gets obscured and out of sight. The blue glow clipped right through that, so you could still figure out where the puck was. If two or more players were in a scrum for a puck stuck along the boards, you could see if it was moving and therefore know if a ref/linesman was going to whistle the play dead. That was quite a handy feature also.

Overall, the implementation / resolution of the puck highlighting in hockey was a bit non ideal, but it did have some real upsides. I don't think it deserved *quite* as much flak as it got...