Framing and lane alignment
The Kinetic Truth Engine™ scores a bowling session from one unbroken shot of your lane. It has to see three things at the same time: your feet from the first step of the approach, the ball leaving your hand at the foul line, and all ten pins when it arrives. A camera that catches two out of three cannot be scored.
Set up in 30 seconds
You do this once per session. Everything after it is bowling.
- Tripod behind the approachOn the concourse, as close to the back of the approach as the centre allows. The further back you go, the more foot traffic crosses your shot.
- About one lane width off centreToward the ball return, not on your lane’s centre line. This is the whole trick: it keeps your own body out of the sight line to the pins.
- Chest to head heightRoughly 1.2 to 1.7 m. High enough to see down the lane, low enough to stay under the overhead monitor.
- Portrait, lane running top to bottomAll ten pins near the top with clear space above them. The foul line low in the frame. Your feet in shot before you take the first step.
- Record in the FSP Games appQuick Play, choose Bowling, then the challenge. The app handles format, countdown and upload.
Stand where you start your approach and look at the phone screen. If you can see your own feet, the foul line and all ten pins without scrolling your eyes off the frame, you are set up.
The lane, in numbers
Every camera rule below comes out of this geometry. A bowling lane is a corridor: 78 ft from the back of the approach to the pins, and 41.5 in across.
Plan view. Distances along the lane are to scale. Lane width is exaggerated, because a true-scale drawing of a 41.5 in lane over 78 ft is a hairline. Positions A, B and C are covered below.
- 60 ft from the foul line to the headpin. Another 34 in of pin deck behind it.
- 41.5 in across, 39 boards, board 20 down the middle.
- 15 ft of approach behind the foul line, and the seven arrows sit 15 ft in front of it, on boards 5 through 35.
- 15 in tall pins, 12 in apart, centre to centre.
That ratio is why bowling records in portrait. The picture that matters is long and thin, and it runs away from you rather than across you.
Where the camera goes
Behind the approach, looking down the lane. The only real decision is how far off the centre line, and the answer is: some.
Behind and offset
Roughly a lane width to one side of your centre line, on the ball-return side. Your body never crosses the line between the lens and the pins, so the deck stays visible through the release and the carry.
Behind and centred
Straight down the centre line. It only works if the lens sits above your head, because at standing height you are a 6 ft object parked directly in front of the pins. Most centres give you nothing to mount that high.
Side on
From the concourse beside the lane. The 78 ft of lane collapses into a thin band and the pin deck disappears behind the masking unit. Useful for looking at your own timing. The engine cannot read it.
At the release you are about 5 m from the lens and the pins are about 24 m past you. To clear a standing bowler on the centre line, the camera has to sit above 2.2 m. To clear the same bowler by stepping sideways, it has to move about 1 m. One of those you can do with a tripod on the floor.
What the frame has to hold
This is the shot. Five things in it, all at once, for the whole session.
The frame, from position A. The lane runs top to bottom and fills the height of the picture. Nothing important sits within a finger of an edge.
- 01All ten pins, with air above them. Leave a strip of clear frame over the deck. If the pins touch the top edge, a small bump in the tripod loses them.
- 02Both channels. The engine finds your lane by its edges. One channel cropped and it is guessing which lane it is looking at.
- 03The foul line, across its full width. This is the reference the release is measured against.
- 04Your feet, from the first step. The approach is scored, not just the release. Feet cut off at the bottom edge is the single most common reason a session comes back short.
- 05A clear walkway. Nothing parked between the lens and the approach. Bags, ball racks and the person waiting to bowl next all count.
Six ways it goes wrong
Every one of these produces a video that looks fine to you and reads as unusable to the engine.
Recording requirements
Record in the app and most of this is handled for you. It is here because people shoot on other cameras, and because knowing why a rule exists makes it easier to keep.
The foul line across its full width, both channels, all ten pins with clear space above them, and your feet from the first step of the approach. Nothing cut off at any point in the session.
Portrait. Bowling runs a portrait flow in the FSP Games app. A landscape recording spends most of its width on the lanes either side of yours and squeezes the one that counts.
Behind the approach, about one lane width off your centre line, on the ball-return side. Close to the back of the approach rather than deep in the concourse.
Chest to head height, roughly 1.2 to 1.7 m. Below that and the lane flattens out. Above it and the overhead monitor starts eating the pin deck.
Tripod, on the floor. Not handheld, not propped on a bag, and not on the ball return, which shakes every time a ball comes back up.
Once the session starts, the phone does not move.
One bowler, one session, one unbroken take. Start before you step onto the approach and stop after the last ball has finished with the pins.
Do not cut between frames. The dead time between deliveries is removed for you, and cutting it yourself makes the whole thing read as one continuous shot.
1080p at 30 fps or better. A ball at 17 mph covers about 25 cm between frames at 30 fps, so 60 fps gives the ball path twice as much to work with.
House lights on. No glow or cosmic sessions, no strobes, no coloured wash.
Bowling centres are dim, and a phone left to itself answers that with a slow shutter, which smears a moving ball. Lock the exposure on the lane before you start, and do not let it meter off a bright scoring monitor.
Turn off HDR, video stabilisation, slow motion and any cinematic or portrait mode. Each one re-times or re-crops the picture after the fact.
Do not use digital zoom. Move the tripod instead.
Ask the centre before you set up a tripod. Most are happy about it on a quiet afternoon and less happy on a league night.
Behind the approach is a walkway. Anyone who crosses it walks through your session, and anyone you film is your responsibility.
Questions
Portrait, really?
Really. A lane is 78 ft long and 41.5 in wide, so the axis carrying the information runs away from you, not across you. Portrait puts the approach at the bottom of the picture and the pins at the top and uses the whole height in between. Squash is the sport that records landscape, because a squash court is wide.
Can two of us share one camera setup?
Yes. Set the tripod once and leave it. Each session is scored against one player, so start a new recording when the other person is up rather than running one long take across both of you.
Does it matter which ball I use?
Not to the setup. It does affect how easy the ball is to follow: a dark ball on a dark lane under dim house lights is the hardest case there is. If you have a choice between two balls you are equally happy with, take the brighter one.
I bowl two-handed. Does that change anything?
No. The requirement is the same either way, and it is the one people get wrong most often: your feet stay in frame all the way through the slide.
String pins or free-fall pinsetters?
The camera setup is identical. What the engine needs is an unobstructed view of the deck at the moment of impact, and that requirement does not care how the pins are reset afterwards.
What about bumpers?
That is a scoring question rather than a camera one. Check the rules screen on the challenge before you record.
The centre's monitor already shows my score. Does that help?
No, and do not reframe to fit it in. Scoring reads the pins on the deck, not the screen above them. A house monitor in shot is a bright light source that makes your exposure worse and buys you nothing.
Can someone hold the phone for me?
No. Handheld footage drifts, and when the frame moves, every reference the engine has fixed on moves with it. A cheap tripod is better than a steady friend.
Can I use a GoPro or a proper camera?
Anything that shoots 1080p at 30 fps or better, mounted the same way, in portrait. Recording in the FSP Games app is still the easier path, because it sets the format, runs the countdown and handles the upload.
My session came back without a score.
Work down this list before you re-record. In order of how often each one is the cause:
- Feet cut off at the bottom of the frame during the approach.
- A channel cropped, so the lane edges are incomplete.
- Your own body across the pin deck at impact, which means the camera was on the centre line.
- Someone walked between the camera and the approach.
- The recording was cut between frames.
- Glow lighting, or an exposure locked on something bright.
When do I get the score?
The app moves to Score in review as soon as the upload finishes. The scored result arrives in Score Review, with an AI-powered replay of the session over the top of your video.
What happens to my video?
Verification runs on your phone together with off-device processing, and part of scoring involves review by people. That is set out in the AI and Data Processing Notice.
Who can see an upload is yours to set, under Settings, Privacy and safety. Save originals to camera roll, under Challenge settings, keeps a full-length copy of every recording on your own device.
Send us the frame
If a setup keeps coming back unscored, a screenshot of the camera preview tells us more than a description of it does. Send it to support@futureofsports.io with the lane and the centre.