Cyclops is a computer system co-invented by Bill Carlton of

Great Britain Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It ...

and Margaret Parnis England of

Malta Malta ( , , ), officially the Republic of Malta ( mt, Repubblika ta' Malta ), is an island country in the Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an archipelago, between Italy and Libya, and is often considered a part of Southern Europe. It lies ...

, which is used on the ATP and WTA professional

tennis Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent (singles) or between two teams of two players each (doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball cov ...

tours as an

electronic line judge An electronic line judge is a device used in tennis to automatically detect where a ball has landed on the court. Attempts to revolutionize tennis officiating and the judging of calls in the sport began in the early 1970s and has resulted in the d ...

to help determine whether a serve is in or out. The system, which must be activated by the service line umpire before each serve, projects five or six

infra-red Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from around ...

horizontal beams of light along the court 10 mm above the ground. One beam covers the good (short) side of the service line and others cover the fault (long) side. If a served ball hits the first beam, the other beams are turned off, while a long serve will break one of the other beams. A long serve is indicated by an audible signal. Obvious long serves that go beyond Cyclops' beams are called by the service line umpire. The system is tuned before and during each tournament by a representative of the company which rents the system. This representative stays through the tournament and confers with tournament officials afterwards to determine any problems which may have arisen. The system has been constantly refined to improve accuracy, although no statistics on its efficacy are available. The Cyclops computer system was introduced to the

Wimbledon Championships The Wimbledon Championships, commonly known simply as Wimbledon, is the oldest tennis tournament in the world and is widely regarded as the most prestigious. It has been held at the All England Club in Wimbledon, London, since 1877 and is pla ...

in 1980 and the U.S. Open in 1981, and was also used at the

Australian Open The Australian Open is a tennis tournament held annually at Melbourne Park in Melbourne, Australia. The tournament is the first of the four Grand Slam tennis events held each year, preceding the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Ope ...

. With the advent of the more comprehensive

Hawk-eye Hawk-Eye is a computer vision system used in numerous sports such as cricket, tennis, Gaelic football, badminton, hurling, rugby union, association football and volleyball, to visually track the trajectory of the ball and display a profile of ...

system in the early 2000s, Cyclops began to be superseded at major tournaments. Cyclops was replaced by Hawk-eye at the US Open from 2006, and at the Australian Open and Wimbledon from 2007.Smith, Stevie
Cyclops ousted by HawkEye at Wimbledon
''Tennis News'' (April 25, 2007) Cyclops is not currently used in any capacity at any of the tennis Grand Slam events.

Notes

{{tennis box Tennis equipment Sports officiating technology

See also

Notes