Zepp Sports Sensor Now Pits You Against Pro Athletes

Zepp's fancy sports tracking nugget could always show you how your golf or baseball swing was shaping up, but a new deal with pro-level athletes can now tell you how you compare with those earning big bucks in the sports. Zepp launched back in 2013, a 1-inch square dongle that clips to your golf glove or baseball/softball bat and comes filled with sensors to track movement in 3D and then feed performance stats to a companion app. Now, though, there's a whole new level of training aid integrated, including 3D modeling, as well as a free version of the app to get an early taster.

Pair the app with the sensor and you can now see a full 3D, spinnable and zoomable replay of what you did with each play. Alternatively, you can prop up your phone or tablet and use its camera to record what happened, and then annotate the replay.

Zepp has already been and captured the same data from athletes like Mike Trout, Hunter Pence, David Ortiz, Keegan Bradley, and Jennie Finch, and so as well as reviewing your own performance you can compare it to each of theirs. There are 3D swing models along with HD videos, and you can watch them side-by-side with your own to see how they shape up.

Background information on each sportsperson is included, with a "pro stories" section in which they individually explain how they train. That links into video tutorials, tips, and drills that users themselves can follow to improve their own skills.

If you have the Zepp sensor, you can do all of the 3D motion capture, analyze and compare the data, and set performance goals to beat. However, Zepp's app is a free download for iOS, and comes with the various pro-player data, videos, training, and video comparison tools.

Zepp can serve up as much or as little data as you want: you can either have all of your swing boiled down into a single metric, or you can see each of the different factors like plane and tempo individually. Right now, managing a full team of players with the app is a bit of a kludge, but in the future Zepp tells us there'll be more comprehensive tools so that a coach could keep track of all of their players performance.

Future releases could also support comparing two amateur players', in the same way that the current app can compare amateur with pro.

The team is also watching things like Apple's HealthKit closely, in addition to things like WatchKit, the newly-announced SDK for Apple Watch. Factoring in the wearable's sensors, not to mention data from the M8 motion co-processor in the iPhone 6 in your pocket, could add data about things like hip rotation into Zepp's overall metrics.

Theoretically the platform could also support multiple sensors worn on the same athlete, though that's another idea for a future update, Zepp tells us.

The Zepp sensor is available now, priced at $149.99, while the new app is in the App Store today.