Olympic Committee Eyes App for Fast Access to Athlete Profiles

May 16, 2018

Tokyo- A student's idea for an app enabling quicker access to the profiles of Olympic athletes has drawn the attention of the organizing committee for the 2020 Tokyo Games, backed by hopes that it will meet the changing needs of modern sports fans.

The committee picked the app idea, proposed by Eisuke Sugitani, a 20-year-old junior at Doshisha University in the western Japan city of Kyoto, of providing athlete profiles to users who hold their smartphones to focus on particular athletes' faces on television as the best in a student ideas contest for new media for the quadrennial sporting event.

If a sports fan wants to know more about a particular athlete when watching the Olympics and Paralympics on TV, the fan will have difficulty finding the athlete on the Internet without the knowledge of the athlete's name.

Sugitani got the idea for the app when he thought about how to familiarize Japanese sports viewers with foreign athletes.

The problem must be the same for foreign fans watching Japanese athletes, he said.

The basic idea of the app is to allow users to immediately access information on an athlete by pointing their smartphones at the athlete's face on TV.

Sugitani, who is interested in how sports and technology can be linked, wanted to create something that could be used easily, after thinking about the behavioral tendencies of young people, including himself.

Another app idea he has is to display sports videos on the Internet sorted by artificial intelligence on the basis of users' search histories.

The Tokyo Games organizing committee has started looking at making the winning app idea a reality.

People who are not accustomed to online searches could use the app, Takeshi Tachi, head of the committee's Technology Services Bureau, said, noting its usability across a wide range of generations.

While admitting the challenges for creating the app, including with face-recognition technologies and image rights, the committee will aim for user-friendliness and try to realize the app as envisaged, using existing technologies, according to Tachi.

The committee is considering an alternative system for delivering real-time information about Olympic events to the app, allowing users to access information on athletes smoothly without online searches, he said.

Sugitani said he hopes to include information on daily life at Olympic athlete villages in the app.

"One way to realize the idea is to let athletes spontaneously post (information on their lives at the athlete villages) on a platform prepared by the organizing committee" for such a system, Tachi said.