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Hello,
I was looking at people complain about K-Zone, a system used in baseball to track strikes and balls. Everyone is saying baseball is 3D, but the system is 2D, so it can't work. And I'm pretty sure you can project 3D on a 2D plane, just like you can use 2D to emulate 3D.
If anyone could explain why or why not, I'd appreciate it. I just got out of surgery so I'm a little slow.
I know nothing about baseball.
Of coarse you can project 3D stuff to a 2D plane. But you loose some information.
Let's take Billiards for example. We likely use the tables surface as the projection plane. It works well enough we can make a top down billiards game. But some things are not possible, like one ball jumping over another ball. Our 2D simulation would lack the dimension of height, so the two balls would collide in our simulation, while in reality the would not.
Still, our 2D game can be quite a realistic simulation, because such special cases rarely affect the game. Same holds for soccer, almost.
For baseball it's a bit more problematic, because the balls height covers a big range, and vertical ball movement is very important. Dribbling with the ball constantly moves it up and down, hitting the goal requires to hit its height, etc.
Still, a simplified 2D baseball game can work and can be fun.
And making a 3D simulation of baseball won't be realistic either, because we can not yet simulate humans. We use animations instead, which is a big compromise especially for sports games.
You'd need to explain K-Zone, or your specific worries and goals in more detail, maybe.
@LedMar If you look at a “flight tracker,” you see an airplane overlaid on top of a map.
The map is 2D. The airplane is 3D. This is an example of 3D being projected to 2D.
In sports, when we talk about “zones” or “lines,” then we're typically doing a top-down projection from 3D world to 2D playing field.
In baseball, an additional projection is the “strike zone” box where the pitcher has to throw the ball to the catcher. This is still a 2D area, but it's vertical, so the projection is onto the 2D plane described by the base plate and the local “up” vector. (It's actually a 3D volume, but the pitcher is oriented such that it's really hard to throw sideways at this box, and it's also essentially impossible for the umpire to make a call on anything but the 2D projection of this box.)
If there's some other kind of projection you're interested in, being more specific about the question, will lead to more specific answers.
JoeJ said:
For baseball it's a bit more problematic, because the balls height covers a big range, and vertical ball movement is very important. Dribbling with the ball constantly moves it up and down, hitting the goal requires to hit its height, etc.
How do you dribble a baseball?
fleabay said:
How do you dribble a baseball?
Haha, oops - i was confusing baseball with basketball :D
But is i said - knowing nothing about it <: )
We do this projection all the time.
The 2d image on the screen is a projection of the 3d world simulation.
The math is straightforward for any projection. There are 2d visual simulations from 4d hyperspace systems, and even more complex data systems, 5d, 6d, the most complex I have seen was an 8d crystaline volume. It can be difficult to wrap your brain around the visual result, but the projection itself is straightforward matrix math reducing the higher dimensional point to the point's location on the 2d projection.
