The Arena Football League (AFL) plans to introduce wearable cameras embedded into players' helmets during the coming season that begins in March, it announced on Tuesday.
The league said in a press release that it has "agreed in principle" to a partnership with a company called Sports Video Innovations to introduce a technology called "Schutt Vision" to the helmets worn by AFL teams. The tiny cameras would fit into helmets' nose bumpers.
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Schutt produces AFL helmets (Riddell does so for the NFL). The nose bumper is the small white rectangle just above a player's eyes near where the face-mask meets the rest of the helmet. As detailed in this exhaustive Uni Watch piece, nose bumpers sometimes feature team names, helmet-makers' logos or other markings. Sometimes they're left blank. Never, however, have they harbored cameras on any kind of regular or mass basis.
The AFL's announcement says the cameras will shoot live video and be "fully impact resistant."
The AFL hadn't returned our request for comment at time of this writing, but AFL commissioner Jerry B. Kurz said in the league's announcement press release: “Our League has always strived to stay on the cutting edge of innovation. Schutt Vision will allow us to make history by placing cameras on multiple players during games for the first time in sports history.”
The NFL has experimented with wearable cameras for several years, but never developed anything with real utility for fans, teams or the league. The AFL release leaves little to go on for now, but helmet-embedded cameras that can withstand crushing hits while capturing in-game footage would be a game-changer.
Time will tell just what exactly the AFL has up its sleeve, but one thing is for certain. Any step — no matter how small — toward seeing astonishing moments like this from a star player's perspective is one giant leap for sports fans the world over:

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