View Fans from World Series Games with TagOramic

by
November 1, 2010

MLB has a crazy new feature that let’s you view the entire crowd of every World Series game and two games from each of the other playoff series. During the game a single camera takes hundreds of photographs of the crowd, which are spliced together into a gigantic panoramic photograph. The photograph is of such high resolution that you can zoom in to see individual faces. It is linked up with Facebook so that you can tag yourself or your friend. It is called TagOramic. This is the full picture from last night’s game.

The boxes indicate how many fans in each section have been tagged. Those tagged have a blue indicator, but only their friends can see who they are. If you are friends with a person the indicator is red, and, if it is you, yellow. Here is a picture zoomed in on a section of the crowd.

Pretty good resolution, MLB gives the details on the photograph:

Panoramic image from the third inning of Game 4 of the World Series at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, TX. The image is made up of 360 photos (30 across by 12 down) stitched together taken over a 19-minute span. The final hi-res file is 83,287 X 19,158 pixels or 1,596 megapixels. Photos by David Bergman.

I imagine it would be fun to see myself or a friend captured at some random point in the game, but none of my friends have been to any of the games. Even so it is cool to scan around the field and find people mid-hotdog bite, cheering, talking on their phone (it is surprising how many people are talking on or checking their phone), or whatever.

It does feel strange, and a little voyeuristic, to see this one moment in time for 50 thousand-ish people. From a privacy perspective I guess going to a game leaves you open to being projected on the jumbotron, or even being on the TV broadcast, and this isn’t any more of an invasion.

I was on the lookout for a particular group of fans at the game last night and found them in the first row on the first-base line.

Anyway a pretty cool application of high-resolution photography, photo-splicing software and Facebook tagging.

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Dave Allen's other baseball work can be found at Baseball Analysts.

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johng
15 years ago

Just out of curiosity, does MLB claim the right to document and publish whom was at a baseball game? And I would imagine that if somebody took their under 12-year-old child to a baseball game, I don’t care what their ticket said, MLB cannot claim the right to post pictures of children on the internet without the “express written consent” of their guardian.

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