ProBeat: Even Ronaldinho needs computer vision to promote Teqball

Every year, Web Summit attracts celebrities from all over the world. This time, one of them was Ronaldinho, one of the greatest soccer football players of all time. Ronaldinho was promoting Teqball, a sort of mashup of football and table tennis played on a curved table. While I would love to spend this week’s column writing about how much fun my friends and I would have if we played Teqball all weekend, that’s not what stood out to me.

No. What struck me was that the creators of Teqball, football enthusiasts Gábor Borsányi and Viktor Huszár, concluded that they had to build an app called Sqiller to promote the new sport. And not just any app — one that uses machine learning and computer vision. Apparently, shooting videos isn’t enough in 2019. Having football stars Ronaldinho and Cafu as your ambassadors for a football-like sport isn’t enough. You need them, a mobile app, and some AI, plus a little gamification for good measure.