Several times during the men’s final of the Madrid Open tennis tournament between Casper Ruud and Jack Draper last spring, TV viewers were treated to a remarkable camera perspective. They watched the match from just behind the baseline, effortlessly following the player’s movement step for step and glimpsing his perfect angle on the ball with every shot.
With no discernible blur or delays, the smoothly flowing live footage had the hyper-real feel of a video game.
“I love the footwork by the cameraman,” wrote one YouTube commenter.
The company now uses the comment in its investor pitch deck.
In reality, these uncanny tracking shots didn’t involve any human camera operators at all. No robotic cameras or drones, either. Instead they were generated, in real time, with a software-based camera system developed by startup Muybridge, based in Oslo.
Founded by Håkon Espeland and Anders Tomren in 2020, Muybridge has spent nearly five years developing real-time computer vision technology that uses software to create a “weightless” camera, with no moving parts, that captures the speed and motion of live sports in a way that our eyes aren’t accustomed to. In the coming year, viewers of televised sports will get to see many more of these revelatory perspectives—both in tennis and beyond.
Muybridge has shifted the paradigm—twice
“Four hundred years of camera history is ending here,” explains Espeland, standing beside a framed black-and-white portrait of motion-picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, the company’s namesake, at the company’s headquarters in Oslo’s hip Grünerløkka neighborhood during Oslo Innovation Week last fall.
