A camera system worth nearly $1 million and capable of allowing a video referee to instantly rule on a forward pass or offside is being tested in Dunedin.
Animation Research Ltd (ARL) managing director Ian Taylor said the Cineflex camera system was most recently mounted on a helicopter and captured the live America's Cup racing, utilising ARL overlaid graphics.
The camera was on loan, free of charge, from Amis Productions for three months.
The English production company was not using it between the America's Cup and the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.
ARL would use the camera to build a ''forward pass line'' graphic for a live rugby broadcast.
''So you can tell straight away if the ball was forward or if somebody was offside,'' Mr Taylor said.
Sailing operations manager John Rendall (26) said the 31kg camera was airfreighted to Dunedin after the America's Cup in San Francisco.
The ''beauty'' of the stabilised camera was being able to operate it by remote control, he said.
Graphics were harder to sync to a live broadcast captured by a manually operated camera.
''The cool thing about the Cineflex is it's got some serious kit and you can make it look like it's human controlled, once you can drive it.''
The team tested the camera for two hours this week at Forsyth Barr Stadium before having to turn it off because of an All Black training session.
The ''initial understanding and learning'' of the camera would reveal what sorts of graphics could be created.
''So many ideas will come when we see the true potential of it.''
Already the company is working on its potential for use in cricket.
Cricket operations manager Troy McNeill (36) said new graphics would be created and tested with the camera before the start of the Ashes series in Australia next month.
They would probably include ''a lot of the stuff we probably haven't thought of yet''.
