Sunday, August 2, 2015

GameFish: Point Progression, Key Shots, Rallies

The GameFish visualization provides a single-glance overview of one game from a tennis match.  It is an enhancement of the standard score-matrix for tennis matches.  


The GameFish above is an example from the 2015 Finals at Roland Garros between Stan Wawrinka and Novak Djokovic (the preceding link takes you to the TAVA visualization of the match).

The boxes on the left of the graphic indicate that the server was Stan Wawrinka, as well as the outcomes for all first and second serves.  Light Green dots represent Service Winners; Yellow dots represent Serves that were "In"; Red dots represent faults.  In this game there were no Aces (darker Green dots).  On the right of the graphic the dots represent Novak Djokovic's Return of Serve.

The Game Grid in the center of the graphic indicates the winner of the point by cell color (blue for Wawrinka; purple for Djokovic) as well as the final "Key Shot" which determined the point winner.  In this game there were only three points won with Winners; the majority of points were won due to opponent error.

Rally lengths are depicted with bluish-grey bars which appear "behind" the GameFish.  These rally-bars turn yellow when the mouse hovers over the point, and the number of shots and point-score appear at the top of the graphic.

The GameFish also triggers orientation highlighting in the Sunburst visualization which is the primary control structure for TAVA and which is used to "drive" the GameFish visualizations.


I have seen a fish-like view used in a number of tennis betting applications (example), and it bears some resemblance to the very cool "Game Tree" which appeared on GameSetMap.com in February of 2014.  (An interactive version can be found here).

I also recently discovered the "The Tennis Notebook" blog on Medium.com.  Nikita Taparia created an attractive score-matrix to visualize Point Outcomes for entire matches (point distributions) in Tennis Note # - Rafa in Paris: The Numbers.

There is an IEEE research paper from 2014 which references a "TennisVis" application (apparently a research project) which uses a *very* similar "Fish Grid" to depict point progression.

[update 2015-08-08: found this link on the IEEE contest website to a graphic from "TennisVis"].

The GameFish was derived from and is the basis for the Momentum Chart which strings together all games from a match showing the relative point-score for each player; it is also a control structure within TAVA that provides additional drill-down capabilities for matches which include detailed information about points within games.  

A future post will cover the Court view and the visualization of shots within points.

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