Animated Replays of Euro 2004 Goals
If you're a soccer/football fan following the European championships (which means everyone outside of the USA), the BBC has created a Shockwave site called "Virtual Replay" that shows animated highlights from each Euro 2004 tournament match. The animations themselves are slick, but it's the additional options that really take Virtual Replay to the next level.
You can watch the action at normal or slower speeds, view the action from a first or third person angle (by selecting a player on the field you can see the action through their eyes), or choose from a wide variety of camera angles (right, left, top, behind the goal, flying camera, etc.). There's even a "Ball-cam" option that gives you the perspective from the ball itself!
By exploring the different angles on a given play, you can get a much better idea of how that play develops -- for instance, you can focus on player movement that would normally be obscured or off-screen in a standard video clip and see how the strikers and defenders jockey for position and affect the final outcome. Overall, it's a great idea and a novel way to gain a new perspective on the key incidents in a particular match. I'd love to see this for other sports (particularly US football, basketball, and hockey).
