Tennis match visualizer

Tennis Match Visualizer is a simple interactive application that I have written to visualize professional tennis matches point by point. It parses shot-by-shot data from the Match Charting Project, an initiative that systematically records pro tennis matches in a standardized format, making it possible to analyze patterns and strategies.

Screenshot of the GUI.

The app reads CSV files from the Match Charting Project and uses VPython to turn the match data into a 3D animation. The data is not precise enough to reconstruct every shot exactly, but it should (hopefully) be detailed enough to reproduce the general movement and dynamics of each point.

The Match Charting Project records the approximate landing point of each shot, but does not provide the full initial conditions needed to reconstruct its trajectory. A traditional numerical integration approach would therefore require me to guess the initial position, velocity, and other parameters for each shot. Instead, I chose to work backwards from the available information: I use simplified models of the ball's dynamics to derive analytic trajectories connecting the (approximate) starting and ending points of each shot. This obviously does not reproduce the exact physical trajectory; the aim is simply to obtain consistent motion from the available data.

The application allows users to:

• Select the tournament and match to visualize
• Run matches point by point, with full animation
• Control playback with play/pause, slow motion, and point navigation buttons
• Switch between day and night modes for the court
• Interact with the camera: zoom, rotate, and move freely
• View a live score table and follow the match progression

This project started purely as a personal side project, driven by curiosity and a desire to explore Python, object-oriented design, GUI development, and 3D animation. The goal has always been to learn by doing and experiment with these ideas on a project of my own.