The Stuff Made Here YouTube channel shows some impressive engineering skills, with one of the more recent videos showing a basketball hoop that moves in six dimensions (check out the video if that makes no sense). The hoop is attached to wires that pull it around at speed to capture the ball wherever it is thrown in a room.
By using a combination of a light backboard, six pulleys, tracking balls, and tracking cameras, the software is able to track where the ball is thrown in space and calculate its trajectory. This information is calculated fast and gives the hoop the time it needs to move to the place where the ball will drop, and then the hoop rotates to the correct angle so that the ball goes through the hoop.
It’s incredibly impressive and well worth spending 26 minutes to see how it was built and see it working.
What impressed me towards the end of the video was when the creator, Shane, said that the hoop was only moving at a fraction of its potential and that if made faster and software modified, it could catch the ball multiple times in a single shot. Mind-blowing stuff.
This video is one of several videos showing how you can score points more easily with a moving hoop. The original was a curved backboard to direct the ball in to the hoop. The second was a moving board that rotated, tilted, panned in to the correct direction to catch the ball, and the third being a board that moves in two dimensions on a wall. Take a look below.
