Sprint researchers have used lasers for years to follow an athlete's speed through a whole run. NovaSpeed puts the same method on a tripod and sends every run to the app.
The unit sends short pulses of infrared light down the lane and times how long the reflection from the athlete's back takes to come back.
That way one noisy reading can't make a top speed on its own. The splits and the speed curve come from the same line.
It is the speed the athlete held, not the push of a single step, and the app shows where in the run it came.
A gate only knows when the athlete passed it, so between two gates all it can give is the average speed. That leaves out:
| Timing gates | NovaSpeed | |
|---|---|---|
| Splits | At each gate | At any distance you pick, even after the run |
| Speed at every point | No, an average between gates | Yes, from 1,000 readings a second |
| Setup | A gate at every split | One unit behind the start |
In Sports Engineering (2025), Duthie and colleagues compared a commercial laser system with 100 Hz Vicon motion capture over 25,082 samples of high-speed running. The speeds agreed within 0.06 m/s on average (root mean square error), with a correlation of 0.99.
The study tested a different laser product, not NovaSpeed. It shows what measuring speed with a laser can do.
Read the study
We are happy to go through the details with you, or to talk about how it would fit with what you use today.