BBC Offers Live Animations of FA Cup Matches

I uncovered a new feature of the BBC Sport web site today that you’ll definitely be interested in. It’s an example of how technology is helping to improve the experience of following football matches online.You may be familiar with BBC’s Virtual Replay feature where you can watch goals of the week in an animated form.But now for select FA Cup matches, BBC Sport is combining its text commentary with animations so you can visually picture what’s happening in the game — albeit delayed by a couple of minutes, but still quite impressive.So for those matches where you’re unable to watch it on television, and you’re not satisfied with the text commentary, you may want to watch the Virtual Replay feature. Hopefully the BBC will be able to extend this from the FA Cup to Premiership matches.The image above, by the way, is the highlight of Didier Drogba’s brilliant free kick against Nottingham Forest from earlier today. To give the live animations a test drive, go here.The Virtual Replay technology is developed by a company named Sport Flashback.