I’ve tried the brand new VAR physique scanner and it is like being in a Noughties music video
The new tech will see footballers scanned for the World Cup and a 3D avatar created to ensure they are accurately assessed in VAR offside decisions precise to millimetres
It uses the latest technology(Image: FIFA/Lenovo)
It’s part airport scanner, part Noughties music video, when every rapper wanted to be filmed with a fisheye lens.
You hand over your details to a Lenovo technician, blue plastic covers go over your feet, and you’re walked into a cylindrical white booth plastered floor-to-ceiling in what look like giant QR codes. Arms out, fingers pointing down, middle finger aligned to a marker that registers your exact height, reminiscent of Cristiano Ronaldo ’s famous ‘Siu’ goal pose, and 36 4K cameras fire simultaneously.
It’s over in seconds. The Lenovo team tell me I’m the first tattooed person to try the system, a new test for the technology.
What appeared on FIFA’s own 3D Digital Assets platform 20 minutes later surprised me. I’d braced myself for something blocky and approximate, a PlayStation caricature.
Instead, a ghostly white mesh of three million data points loads first, then texture hits. My face, kit and tattoos rendered with unsettling accuracy.
Even the blue plastic boot covers made the cut. More hologram than video game.
The various AI processes, separating skin from clothing, correcting finger geometry, and validating the face, take roughly three hours per avatar.
To process 1,200 players in nine days, Lenovo runs multiple avatars simultaneously through cloud-based GPU processing. A total of 28 scanners are being deployed across team base camps, built and dismantled by two engineers at each location.
Scanning begins June 4 and runs through to June 13.
The technology is genuinely impressive. It’s also slightly ludicrous we’re going to these lengths to get an offside decision right.
But if the result is a VAR experience that feels more visceral, and greater accuracy in a system nobody completely trusts, that has to be a good thing.
Unless, of course, it’s Harry Maguire’s massive melon adjudged offside in the final.
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