Fair question, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a sales page: yes, AI can genuinely check your swing — some of it, with real numbers — and any tool claiming to measure all of it is padding the truth. Here's exactly where the line sits, using CoachVision's baseball analysis as the worked example, limits included on purpose.

What body tracking actually measures

Film a swing and the system tracks your joints frame by frame — body keypoints from a single camera — then computes measurements from how those points move. What it can see splits by camera angle, because honesty lives in the geometry.

From the open side (camera facing your chest): how far your hands ride back in the load, how far and how on-time your stride lands, your hip-shoulder separation at front-foot landing, your hand speed through the zone, the angle your hands travel into contact, and how far your lead arm extends through the ball.

From behind (down the pitch line): how straight your stride lands and how fully your shoulders finish their turn to face the pitcher.

From either angle: how still your head stays from load to contact, how long the swing takes from launch to contact, where your hands finish, and — across multiple swings — how repeatable your swing is.

These aren't guesses dressed as data; they're computed from tracked motion, in body-relative units so a tall hitter and a short one compare fairly.

What it honestly can't see — and shouldn't pretend to

  • The bat. Invisible. There's no barrel tracking, no bat speed in mph, no attack angle, no cast distance. Hand speed is a hand read and a quickness proxy — the barrel moves far faster than the hands, and no radar gun is involved.
  • The ball, and true contact. Also invisible. "Contact" is defined as the moment your hands reach peak speed, refined to about one frame — which is why a tee swing, a soft-toss cut, and a bone-dry practice swing all score identically. Contact-point depth, whether you squared it up, and ball flight are things the camera cannot see.
  • The setting. Tee, soft toss, live BP or machine — the tracker never knows which, so the reference bands span all four. You know the context; the numbers don't.
  • Grip, hand position, back-foot squish. Below what a phone can resolve on a fast move. A coach can talk about them from the freeze-frames; a number can't.

There's calibration honesty, too. Hip-shoulder separation — the money read — comes from how two pairs of keypoints appear to narrow as your body turns, not a measured joint angle. It's directionally trustworthy and numerically soft, so the app treats it as a strong hint, never a protractor.

Why the limits are the feature

A measured read on the checkpoints that can be measured, plus a coach's-eye read of the keyframes for everything else, is exactly what a swing check needs: numbers where numbers honestly exist, hedging where they don't, and a trend line — same angle, week over week — that no memory can give you. What it replaces isn't a great human hitting coach. It's guessing.

So: can AI check your swing? The measurable half, better than a teammate's eyeball, and it will tell you plainly which half is which. Film one swing, open side, and see what the honest version looks like.