Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through my little adventure with “tennis kubot”. It’s been a ride, let me tell you.
It all started when I was thinking about how to visualize tennis match data in a cool way. I wanted something that went beyond just scores and stats, something that showed the flow and momentum of the game. That’s where the idea for “tennis kubot” popped into my head – a sort of interactive, 3D representation of a match.
First Steps: Getting the Data
Obviously, the first thing I needed was data. Lots and lots of tennis match data. I spent a good chunk of time scraping data from various tennis websites. It was a pain, to be honest. There were different formats, inconsistencies, and websites that just didn’t want to be scraped. I used Python with Beautiful Soup and Requests to pull the data, and then massaged it into a usable format with Pandas. Wrangling data is always 80% of the work, right?
Choosing the Tech Stack
Next up was figuring out what tools to use to actually build this thing. I wanted something that could handle 3D graphics and had some interactivity. After some research, I settled on:
- For the 3D rendering. It’s a JavaScript library, so it plays nicely with web browsers.
- React: To build the user interface and manage the components. I’m pretty comfortable with React, so it was a natural choice.
- For a simple backend to serve the data and handle any server-side logic (although there wasn’t much of that).
Building the 3D Representation
This was the fun part. I started by creating a basic tennis court in *. It’s basically just a bunch of rectangles and lines, but getting the proportions right took some fiddling. Then, I needed to figure out how to represent each point in the match. My idea was to use small spheres that moved along the court, showing the trajectory of the ball on each shot, and maybe even color-code them to represent the player who won the point.
Implementing the Trajectories
This is where I hit a bit of a snag. I didn’t have the actual ball trajectory data for each point (that would be amazing, but I couldn’t find any publicly available data like that). So, I had to approximate it. I used the server’s name and where the point ended to estimate where the serve might have landed.
Adding Interactivity with React
Once I had the basic 3D representation working, it was time to add some interactivity. I used React to create a simple UI with controls for:
- Selecting different matches.
- Playing the match point-by-point.
- Highlighting specific players.
- Zooming and rotating the view.
I used React’s state management to keep track of the current point in the match and update the * scene accordingly. It was a bit tricky to get the two libraries to play nicely together, but after some trial and error, I got it working.
Final Touches and Lessons Learned
After a lot of tweaking and polishing, I finally had something that resembled what I had initially envisioned. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a cool way to visualize tennis match data. I could see the momentum shifts, the key points, and the overall flow of the game.
What I Learned:
- Data wrangling is a pain, but it’s essential.
- * and React can be a powerful combination for interactive 3D visualizations.
- Approximations are okay when you don’t have all the data.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new things.
Overall, “tennis kubot” was a fun and challenging project. I learned a lot along the way, and I’m excited to see what I can build next.
