Imagine this: you’re watching a football game and the quarterback drops back to pass.

You tap your phone and you’re now seeing what the football sees. The ball is thrown and you’re staring back at the quarterback like an onboard rocket cam staring down at the launch pad. The QB gets smaller and smaller in the distance. You tap your phone again, and now you have a view of what the front of the ball is seeing. You’re getting closer and closer to the receiver’s hands until you’re hauled in for a touchdown.

You hear the grinding of the receiver’s fingers on the pigskin as he grips the football.

You hear him grunt as he hits the ground. You then experience the unprecedented sensation of what it’s like to be a football when it gets spiked.

Palm Bay inventor Larry Monari wants to change how you watch sports, and what was just described is one way he’ll do it.

Monari, 76, has patented a way to put cameras and microphones inside athletic equipment such as footballs, hockey pucks and the rubber on a baseball mound.

“We take the pitch, the roll, the yaw out of the picture and sound, process it and ship that off to the media,” he said. “It’s high tech. It is broadcast so the picture is stabilized in forward motion.”

In other words, you’re not spinning as the football spirals or as the hockey puck twists through the air.

His vision is to allow viewers to change camera views on their smart phones or tablets so they can get different looks and sounds.

“It would be a dramatic, exciting event for people viewing it at home on TV and for fans watching in the stadium on their smart phones,” he said. “A person sitting in the stands can choose the thumbnail for the camera and microphone they want. They can choreograph the games.”

If Monari has his druthers, other cameras will be placed inside goal posts, pylons or hockey goals, and you can choose whatever view you’d like to see on 2D, 3D, virtual reality and multidimensional sound.

“We wanted to be on the field, hearing what is going on amongst the players, and seeing it from a variety of vantage points on the playing field,” Monari said. “We want to bring excitement to the fans and since football is one of the sports I enjoy very much, as well as ice hockey, we wanted to implement those first. What we’ve done is applicable to more sports than the ones we’ve talked about. We have other plans going forward.”

Monari and his son Scott have had two patents approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They have more pending. One of the approved patents is more than 1,500 pages with drawings and technical descriptions about how it all comes together. The other is 500 pages.

They explain how their technology works, such as how the cameras won’t change the weight of the ball and can even give people the ability to see what the PSI of the ball is. No more Deflategate.

“They’re more than patents, they’re how to do it,” he said. “We wrote the book on it. We even invented different bladders for footballs. How do you recharge the battery of the cameras inside the football? Do it wirelessly. The cameras do not change the amount of inflation in the football. It weighs and plays exactly how a standard football weighs and plays.

“One of the pending patents has to do with Deflategate. It’ll never happen again with our system. You wouldn’t be able to manipulate the weight. The ball would give you the specs. The controversy came about just as we were trying to solve that problem.”

Other patents pending have to do with virtual reality. If they can make it happen, you’d be able to see what it’s like to be gang-tackled by the defensive line without the agony of being driven into the ground.

The Monaris’ company is called Sports Entertainment Systems.

Larry Monari has an extensive technical and business background, including a PhD in Physics and an MBA. He has worked for Harris, Xerox and Westinghouse. He has been an instructor at Florida Tech, including teaching physics in the ’70s and business and engineering classes more recently.

Scott Monari specializes in the wiring of electrical equipment, towers and buildings.

“I travel around the country – one of things I do is climb towers – amateur, broadcast, water, wind, for fun, hire and to get higher,” Scott Monari said. “I also climb inside the ceilings in buildings like Walmart, Target, Home Depot, to do the electrics. I call it the monkey business of the monkey business. My specialty is wiring, electrics, networking computers, nuts and bolts.”

When questioned about the durability of the athletic balls and cameras that are fallen on by huge men, hit with a stick or struck by a ball, Larry Monari was quick to point out that the patents cover all of that.

“I’ve worked in the aerospace industry, I’m familiar with things like reliability, shock and vibration,” Monari said. “If you look at these patents, you can go on the website (http://sportsentertainmentsystemsllc.com), it has a whole bunch of things we plan to do.”

They’re hoping this technology can make it into sport’s biggest spectacle -- soon.

“One of our goals is get to the Super Bowl in 2017,” Monari said. “It’s a big goal.”

But they have one big hurdle. Actually, they have a Super Bowl-sized hurdle. They don’t have a prototype. Much of their money has been used to get the patents created.

Monari would like to get a grant, but he says they take too long to acquire. He wants to get his idea off the ground now.

They’ve applied for a small business loan, but have been turned down.

They’d like to start with a $50,000 loan to get to the 2017 Super Bowl with a prototype to instrument the football goal posts with “goal post mounted 3-D cameras and special microphones.”

The balls or pucks are much more costly – nearly half a million dollars for a football.

One option would be to team with an investor company that can secure a loan, thus helping them get a prototype to create demos to share with leagues, teams and businesses.

Monari’s ultimate goal is to have sports stadiums employ his technology. Stadium tenants, like the NFL for example, would charge media companies an additional amount to pay for the added high tech content. The NFL would earn additional profit because his technology would add content unlike any seen before.

“A media company would write a contract with the NFL to broadcast sports from those stadiums,” he said. “The sports media is willing to pay more for the content than before because the stadium tenant has more to sell. We need to be talking to both parties.”

But that’s still a way off.  The Super Bowl is less than 8 months away, so that goal might not be achievable.

Monari would like to start by putting his technology to use on a smaller scale to show the NFL that it works.

“We plan to go to high schools and colleges and sell these footballs that are instrumented several different ways,” he said. “By that time, the NFL would be used the new capabilities that this technology offers.”

His vision is clear: he’d like fans sitting on their couch or in a stadium, watching the game on the TV or a smart phone, to change the camera view at will. You can be inside the ball. You’re in the goal post. You’re seeing the players’ sweat hit the ground.

You might even cringe like you are watching a horror film when several 350-pound players seemingly leap on top of you when the ball is fumbled.

Monari has been working on his labor of love for years, and he’s hoping it can benefit people sooner than later.

“It adds a new dimension to the game,” he said. “We want to bring unique excitement to these games.”

Dr. Lawrence M. Monari December 23, 2015 at 1:03 am#

Imagine riding inside an ice hockey puck as it skids along the ice. Imagine hearing the ice beneath the puck. Imagine seeing the goal tender getting closer and closer, and bigger and bigger as he attempts to block and deter the forward motion of the puck.

Imagine riding inside the football passed by the quarterback to a receiver. Imagine hearing the grinding of the receiver’s hands as they catch the football. Imagine hearing the crash and clatter as the receiver is tackled.

Imagine hearing the whoosh of the air as the football is kicked between the goal posts and seeing the football get larger and larger as it tumbles and gets closer and closer to the goal posts.

Imagine sitting inside second base as a runner steals second. Imagine being hit in the face by the runner’s cleats and hearing the crash in surround sound and 3-D.

Imagine sitting inside the pitcher’s rubber and seeing the sweat and stubble on the pitcher’s chin. Imagine seeing the pitcher clutch the seams on the baseball preparing to pitch a curve ball. Imagine seeing a line drive get bigger and bigger as it gets closer and closer as it hits the pitcher.

Imagine sitting inside home plate when the whoosh of the pitched baseball passes over your head. Imagine seeing the stubble on the batter’s chin. Imagine hearing the crack of the bat and the thud when it’s dropped on the ground.

Imagine sitting on the tape of the tennis net when the ball hits and crashes into the tape.

These are but a few scenes and sounds from on the playing field that can now be experienced by sports spectators who attend sports stadiums equipped with the instrumented sports paraphernalia technology covered in U.S. Pat 8,559,555 and U.S. Pat 9,167,228 invented by Dr. Lawrence Maxwell Monari and Lawrence Scott Monari. .

Dr. Lawrence Maxwell Monari and Lawrence Scott Monari are engaged in building a new high tech business in Brevard county Florida called Sports Entertainment Systems, LLC to quickly bring to you these sights and sounds during 2016.

The inventions involve enhancing televised and streamed sporting events from stadiums and arenas. The inventions afford sports spectators the excitement of viewing & hearing the games in 2-D, 3-D and surround sound from vantage points down on the playing field amongst the players. Popular games like football, ice hockey, baseball, soccer, tennis, volleyball are covered. The spectators will witness unique sights and sounds never before seen and heard in broadcast and streaming media. In many ways, the inventions are revolutionary in their ability to intensify the entertainment content of the games. In other ways, the inventions are revolutionary in their ability to intensify the training of the players.

The inventors are currently reviewing potential sites for the business (Sports Entertainment Systems, LLC) and raising the capital necessary to project the business forward.