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The world’s first online penalty shoot-out has taken place at Wembley stadium.
Pitting their clicks against semi-professional goalkeepers, who had changed their names by deed poll to impersonate their more famous counterparts, England fans were given the chance to ‘aim’ over the internet and fire physical footballs from a custom ‘Football Machine’ in real life.
The ‘Penalty Click’ event, organised by The Mirror, resulted in a all-too familiar loss for England, with namesake keeper Neuer saving 114 shots and the assembled England kick takers only managing to knock in 82.
The automated ‘soccer-bot’ was constructed from a bespoke central command system developed especially for the event and nicknamed ‘The Games Master’.
The Games Master consisted of a PC installed with custom code and connected to a web server used to host the online game system.
The system was then made to communicate with the automated machine via an Arduino microcontroller, which controlled three motors on the machine housed in bespoke ‘CDC’d’ cases, allowing users to aim and fire at will.
The creation of the shoot-out website was then developed in HTML5, allowing it to host the live video stream element of the one-off event.
See a video of the cyber-soccer below:
