Few of us have access to a professional coach to help hone our basketball technique, but now, sports technology company Onyx Motion hopes you can at least get a decent proxy. Their upcoming smartwatch app, Swish, will analyze your shots and provide tips to improve them, along with a few words of wisdom here and there from veteran NBA shooting guard Ben Gordon as well as other pro players past and present.
Swish draws inferences about jump timing, release speed, shooting arc angles, and shot consistency from tracking the motion of your wrist. It crunches its data into suggestions that may improve your shooting, and it tunes the tone and style of these suggestions over time based on how your performance changes when you receive a tip.
Onyx Motion sees this as an important early step in applying real-time analytical data and artificial intelligence to kinesthetic learning (that's learning by doing) in sports and other activities such as physical therapy and playing a musical instrument.
It won't replace traditional coaches, but apps like Swish – if they're accurate enough to be useful – could prove a great boon for people looking for immediate feedback coupled with either concrete data or just a little direction to improve their game.
Onyx Motion is attempting to crowdfund the Android Wear and Apple Watch launches of Swish on Indiegogo. Their goal is to raise CAD10,000 (US$7,865), with pledge options include Swish app plus watch packages as well as a CAD2,000 (US$1,573) one-on-one coaching session with Ben Gordon. A mere CAD5 (US$3.93) will get you early beta access to the app. If everything goes to plan, they hope to have Swish out later this year.
You can watch the Swish Indiegogo pitch video below.
Sources: Onyx Motion, Indiegogo