Time-keeping plays a crucial role in competitive sports - it decides who writes history - and the Olympic Games are no different. 

Omega has been the official time-keeper for the Olympics for almost a hundred years. Since they first started in 1932, Omega Timing has developed many advances to ensure that accurate timing are recorded through many advancements. For example, Omega created the first photoelectric cell photo-finish camera, “Magic Eye,” with the British Race Finish Recording Company in 1948. 

Omega introduced its Quantum Timer in London in 2012 with a resolution of one-millionth of a second, 100 times greater than previous devices. As the purview of Olympic games increases, so does Omega's responsibility to develop ways to monitor the games in real-time.

But perhaps the most interesting is how Omega has spent four years training its in-house artificial intelligence to learn beach volleyball. Omega Timing's R&D department comprises 180 engineers, and the development process started with positioning systems and motion sensor systems in-house, according to Zobrist, in 2012. 

The team's goal was to create a system that could provide detailed live data on athlete performance in the 500-plus sports events it works on each year. This data would be measured, processed, and transmitted in less than a tenth of a second, during events to provide in-depth analysis of the event to the viewers. 

With volleyball, it meant that the motion technology, sensors and multiple cameras running at 250 frames a second, along with Artificial Intelligence (AI) had to be trained to recognise different types of shots - from smashes to blocks to spikes and variations thereof—pass types and the ball's flight path, then combine this data with information gleaned from gyroscope sensors in the players clothing. The motion sensors feed information such as the direction of movement of the athletes, height of jumps, speed, etc to the AI system. Once processed, this is all then fed live to broadcasters for use in commentary or on-screen graphics.

According to Zobrist, one of the hardest lessons for the AI to learn was accurately tracking the ball in play when the cameras could no longer see it. “Sometimes, it's covered by an athlete's body part. Sometimes it's out of the TV frame,” said Zobrist to Wired in an interview. “So, the challenge was to track the ball when you have lost it. To have the software predict where the ball goes, and then, when it appears again, recalculate the gap from when it lost the object and got it back, and fill in the [missing] data and then continue automatically. That was one of the biggest issues.”

However, after four years of rigorous research and development, Omega Timings now claims that the beach volleyball system is 99% accurate!