FoxTrax, also referred to as the glowing puck, is an augmented reality system that was used by Fox Sports' telecasts of the National Hockey League (NHL) from 1996 to 1998.
David Hill, the head of Fox Sports at the time, believed that if viewers could easily follow the puck, the game would seem less confusing to newcomers, and hence become more appealing to a broader audience.
Fox has since used "FoxTrax" as a branding for other on-screen tracking graphics in other sports properties, such as a virtual strike zone during baseball games, and statistics displays during NASCAR events.
The technology was co-developed with Etak; the system utilized a modified hockey puck, cut in half to embed an array of infrared emitters, a shock sensor, and an embedded circuit board and battery.
Data from the cameras was transmitted to a production trailer nicknamed the "Puck Truck", which contained SGI workstations used to calculate the coordinates of candidate targets, and render appropriate graphics onto them.
Acknowledging that Canadian-born journalist Peter Jennings (who was interviewed as a guest during the 1996 All-Star Game that introduced the technology) stated on-air that Canadians would "probably hate it", Wyshynski suggested that FoxTrax was an admission that American viewers were "too hockey-stupid to follow the play" or "need to be distracted by shiny new toys in order to watch the sport.
"[2] Cavallaro defended FoxTrax in a 1997 paper for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, calling it an "overall success" that contributed to higher ratings for Fox.
Building upon his work, Cavallaro co-established a new company known as Sportvision in 1998, which marketed other forms of sports graphics technologies, including virtual down lines for football.