Show HN: Hooper – AI-driven stats and highlights for basketball play

Hey everyone, OP here. Wanted to share a bit more about Hooper — I started building it with a good friend of mine six months ago. We play a lot of pickup together and were arguing about who has a better jump shot and ended up hacking together an app to settle it

The way Hooper works is you can record yourself using the app and ideally a tripod (optional). The app will track everyone, whether its a solo practice, a 3v3, or a 5v5. We think there’s a lot of stuff out there for basketball drills but what we really wanted Hooper to be for is actual game play. That means, it can do things like track multiple players, sync two half court recordings, and differentiate 2s vs 3s.

Once you finish recording, it’ll process for a bit and then ask you to tag yourself (and optionally other players). Then it spits back out a few things: you can watch the full footage as well as a clipped version that's only the interesting plays; you can see highlights and offensive box stats for every player.

When you sign up, you get a Hooper profile that tracks your overall stats across the sessions. You can also do things like build a mixtape from your highlights for insta. You can friend other players on Hooper to see their profile & comment on their games (also add us “grub” and “kangexpress”!)

We’ve been in a closed beta for about 3 months now, fixing bugs and getting things to work with a set of early adopters. We are now starting our open beta ! If anyone here wants to try it out, you can just download the app on https://www.hooper.gg/?utm_campaign=h1. We are early in our journey, and lots of improvements to be made in the next few months, but we would love your feedback and ideas!

Show HN: Hooper – AI-driven stats and highlights for basketball play
hooper.gg

This is a cool idea, nice work. I spent some time as an assistant college coach in the NCAA and the amount of time spent reviewing film and capturing key plays/schemes etc is huge. I do some computer vision and always wondered if it would ever be accurate enough to skip over dribbling up the courts, time outs etc so scouts could just get to the important parts of the film—it looks like you are on track with what you claim it can do. I might sign up for the beta... good luck!

What are you using for video analysis?

Yes please try it out, I'd love to know what you think! My email is mike@hooper.gg if you want to chat more about basketball and tech. I would be curious to learn what you have tried so far and what was important to you as a coach

Yeah, it would be super cool if all sports had things like this, i think it really enriches the player's experience. I know in tennis there is swingvision so definitely seems like things are headed that way.

We ended up having to collect our own data and train our own deep learning models for detecting balls, players, court, actions, and tracking. But this was because we needed to make things work almost all the time to achieve our desired accuracy. You should try out off-the-shelf things like YOLO, Segment Anything, and Detectron and then after that you probably need to invest more on data collection and model training.