This Basketball Backboard Adjusts Itself So Your Ball Cannot Miss The Hoop

A while ago, there was a video surfacing on the internet showing a robot that could throw a perfect 3-point shot. That robot was designed to never miss the hoop, but apart from showing off its skills, the robot didn’t help anyone become a better basketball player. However, a new creation will help you score every time you throw the ball.

Specifically, Shane Wighton has created a basketball backboard that actively tracks a ball’s trajectory and repositions itself to make every shot a scoring one. Previously, he made a curved basketball backboard for the same purpose.

With the aim of turning any regular person into an NBA superstar, Wighton used some complex math to figure out the perfect elliptic paraboloid for the basketball backboard. But that required a person to throw the ball from an exact distance and from a specific spot, which helped no one. The new backboard, on the other hand, is near perfect.

Microsoft Kinect may be nothing but a dead console gaming accessory, but tinkerers and hackers can still use it as a cheap thing for their projects. In this particular case, Wighton has mounted a Kinet on the backboard, above the hoop to recognize the ball, track its trajectory, and identify multiple players. This allowed him to cheat when playing one-on-one.

He calculated that on average the electronics and the custom software powering the backboard has about 600 milliseconds for identifying and distinguishing the ball from players’ heads, calculating the ball’s trajectory as well as the ultimate point of impact on the backboard, then making the right positional adjustments to make the ball fall into the hoop. See the outcome in this video.

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