On ice or on air?: how an egregious glowing hockey puck crossed the line into augmented reality

Abstract

Our article provides a media genealogy of FoxTrax—or the ‘glowing hockey puck.’ Focusing on its role in the digitization of sports media and augmented reality, we frame FoxTrax as a story of ‘becoming-media,’ which Joseph Vogl conceptualizes as the ways in which an object, in the act of becoming a medium, ‘[transforms] apparatuses, symbolic orders, or institutions.’ By transforming the hockey puck into an information-bearing device, FoxTrax inaugurated an augmented reality distinct from the visual reality of the game on the ice. Traces of FoxTrax are now ubiquitous in televised sports, including American football’s 1st & Ten artificial first down lines, sailing’s LiveLine, tennis and cricket’s Hawk-Eye broadcast enhancement tools, and baseball’s FoxTrax pitch locator. These technologies not only change how sports look; they reshape sporting events as data visualisation systems. In this revision of sports, infrastructure and equipment such as the arena, puck, and camera mediate the visible by processing invisible information as augmented reality.