The way Hooper works is you can record yourself using the app and ideally a tripod (optional). The app will track everyone, whether its a solo practice, a 3v3, or a 5v5. We think there’s a lot of stuff out there for basketball drills but what we really wanted Hooper to be for is actual game play. That means, it can do things like track multiple players, sync two half court recordings, and differentiate 2s vs 3s.
Once you finish recording, it’ll process for a bit and then ask you to tag yourself (and optionally other players). Then it spits back out a few things: you can watch the full footage as well as a clipped version that's only the interesting plays; you can see highlights and offensive box stats for every player.
When you sign up, you get a Hooper profile that tracks your overall stats across the sessions. You can also do things like build a mixtape from your highlights for insta. You can friend other players on Hooper to see their profile & comment on their games (also add us “grub” and “kangexpress”!)
We’ve been in a closed beta for about 3 months now, fixing bugs and getting things to work with a set of early adopters. We are now starting our open beta ! If anyone here wants to try it out, you can just download the app on https://www.hooper.gg/?utm_campaign=h1. We are early in our journey, and lots of improvements to be made in the next few months, but we would love your feedback and ideas!
1) Love the feed, realized its nice to see other random games i have no connection to. Wouldn't have thought it would be entertaining but its great.
2) Export video to camera roll: im sure some folks will want to export the whole thing (update: now i see that you can do it when you full screen it, may want to move that to the menu on the video processing screen).
3) Creating sharable clips that are branded can definitely help grow the app. Seems like you may be able to identify types of highlights, so mashing them up, with some graphic overlays and voiceovers (think play by play with elevenlabs). Have a few folks who work in this space for sports teams that may be able to give some guidance.
4) Turning the screen off while recording is a brilliant feature and is reassuring
5) Realtime scoring is likely harder but would be a killer feature.
Love this, all the best on the development!
+1 on the graphic overlays and voiceovers. I personally want to add Mike Breen's Bang bang voice over as an option haha. Also check out mixtapes on your profile page if you haven't yet. You can mashup highlights that way from different recorded sessions.
+1 on realtime scoring and processing. Right now, a recording takes ~30min to process. We are trying to reduce this over time as much as we can until it is close to live.
One thing I found odd was that the default/main screen in the app is a feed. That feed is just short videos without any of the game data the app captures. Perhaps an overlay would showoff the app as well as the skills. The videos by themselves don't add much differentiated value.
Re: highlight segmentation was and still is a challenge that we work on. In the beginning we had a hard time dealing with false positives when our models thought a shot was in but it wasn't. This has gotten better over time with more data and is hovering near 92% acc these days but obv not 100%. But i'm optimistic as data grows and the sota methods get better, this isn't the hardest ml problem in the world
Also any plans to make it work from camera footage e.g. A 360 camera that can capture the whole court at once instead of syncing?
Re: capturing the whole court, I think we are considering supporting panning of the camera (in addition to syncing). We focus pretty heavily on making sure things work with just a normal phone so it's more accessible to everyone. We are definitely starting bottom up but maybe one day we will get to more high tech hardware.
At my pickups courts we call our own fouls by saying Foul. Perhaps the mic can pickup key words matched the play stopping.
In relation to user experience on first try...I just wanted to test it out for 30 second to see if it's worth keeping. I haven't tested now, will have to wait until I get an hour free later because there are a few roadblocks. - You require email and password registration and to click a verification link. Not too bad - When first launched the app asks you to allow mic permissions by clicking settings. However in Hooper settings on Android there is no mic permissions option. Bad. - You require 5gb free to use the product at all. Understandable given storage is required for video but how about reducing that so users can do like a 30-second test for first use? That way they don't have to spend an hour going through their phone's media to see what they want to keep and what they can delete.
You'd be amazed at how many people (like me lol) have almost full storage on their device most of the time.
Edit: oh....it's not a setting for mic permissions, it's a general permissions setting and if you touch that you can add additional permissions. Based on the text of the popup I hadn't guessed that was the right place to look and I hadn't realised it was possible to add permissions by touching that area of the settings menu.
Care to share any technical details about how your analysis pipeline works? :)
We ended up having to collect our own data and train our own deep learning models for detecting balls, players, court, actions, and tracking. But this was because we needed to make things work almost all the time to achieve our desired accuracy. You should try out off-the-shelf things like YOLO, Segment Anything, and Detectron and then after that you probably need to invest more on data collection and model training.
Also, the technology was used in their latest Euro 2024 ball - the Fussballliebe - to help video referees and their decisions.