Western dressage · Live & measured
Western dressage judged live from your own arena. Set the phone that is already on your tripod, ride your test, and the geometry is scored the instant your hand comes down — centerline deviation in centimeters, halt squareness to the hoof, tempo in beats per minute. A licensed judge's marks follow in the same sitting. Not in ten days. Not by email.
Three strides in — the first point on the centerline
The 20-meter circle the test asks for, painted on the footing the way a first-down line is painted on a field. The track the horse actually rode, drawn in behind them. And underneath it, ghosted, the track of the horse currently leading the class. Nobody in this sport has ever been shown why one ride beat another. This shows it in one picture.
Every line above is computed, not drawn by hand. The perspective comes from the same camera solve the scoring uses — twelve lettered control points on a surveyed plane — which is why the circle sits on the footing rather than floating over it, and why the number beside it is a measurement rather than an opinion.
| Movement | Judge | Machine measured | Δ to leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · A | 7.5 | Centerline dev 0.09 m · halt ± 4.1 cm | −0.5 |
| 2 · C | 7.0 | Turn radius 5.8 m · tempo 81 bpm | −1.0 |
| 3 · H–X–F | 8.0 | Diagonal true to 0.12 m · lengthened 11 strides | +0.5 |
| 6 · B | 7.5 | Circle Ø 20.30 m · worst dev 0.41 m · tempo ± 1.4 | −0.5 |
| 9 · K | 7.5 | Left lead struck at K + 0.3 s · 0 changes | −0.5 |
| 12 · X | 8.0 | Halt square ± 3.1 cm · immobile 4.2 s | +0.5 |
Where the sport is today
This is not a caricature of the competition. It is the written rule at recognized online shows, right now, in 2026.
A ride, start to finish
Set the phone behind C, the way the rulebook already tells you to, and drop the marker boards on the letters. The app finds all twelve control points, solves the camera pose, and reports its own error in millimeters. If a camera is badly placed it tells you where to move it — before you mount, not after you ride.
Pose estimation runs on the phone. What leaves your barn is a stream of skeletal keypoints at about 17 kilobytes a second — roughly a two-hundredth of the video. On one bar of rural LTE the measurements still arrive live and exact. The video is the replay. The numbers are the instrument.
It was never computed at the end; it was computed the whole way through. The salute just closes it. The judge confirms their marks, the combined score publishes, and the leaderboard moves while you are still walking your horse out on a long rein.
The line we will not cross
Every serious voice in this argument says the same thing, and we took it as a specification rather than a limitation. We will never tell you a computer judged your horse. We will tell you exactly what it measured, exactly how well, and leave the rest to a person who has spent a life around horses.
“It doesn't judge in the human sense. It measures — where limbs are positioned, how quickly they move.” Dr. David Stickland, Global Equestrian Technology
The measured half never places a horse on its own in a judged class. The judged half is always a person, always licensed, and always named on the sheet.
The physics, stated plainly
The arena is a surveyed plane with twelve control points at exact meter coordinates. Four are enough to solve the mapping from pixels to meters; we have twelve, so the fit is overdetermined and every session can publish its own error. What a camera can and cannot see from a given spot is not a matter of opinion — it falls out of the geometry. So we built the classes around the geometry instead of pretending it isn't there.
| Tier | Rig | Position accuracy | What it unlocks | Class type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | One phone behind CAny tripod. Any barn. Today. | ± 2 cm lateral± 20–55 cm down-range at the far end | Centerline accuracy, tempo, rhythm, transition timing, ride time. Everything that lives on one axis or in the time domain. | Measured onlyFree or a few dollars |
| II | Two phones, C and BThe errors are orthogonal, so they cancel | ± 2 cm anywhereIn the whole 20 × 60 | Everything above, plus halt squareness and time behind the vertical — which are impossible from C alone, because the hind legs hide behind the front. | Recognized online showMeasured + judged |
| III | Seven fixed cameras — one at every judge's postC, H, E, B, M, plus A and one overhead. 8 MP, PoE, 5 m up. | 0.35 cm at 30 mSub-centimeter over most of the arena. Footfall to ± 4 ms. | Hoof flight arcs, joint angles, suspension duration, limb timing asymmetry, diagonal advanced placement. The quality metrics, not just the accuracy ones. | Championship & qualifierCertified venue |
Not a typo, and not a projection. Seven 8-megapixel PoE cameras at $442 each, a switch, cable, mounts and a compute node. There is no mast, no solar array and no battery, because an arena has a roof beam and a wall socket. There is no long-range optics problem, because the longest sightline in a 20 × 60 arena is 63 meters.
At 12 mm those cameras resolve about 148 pixels per degree — roughly two and a half times the angular resolution of a phone at 4K. Mounted five meters up, the position error is 0.18 cm at 15 m, 0.35 cm at 30 m, and 0.53 cm at 45 m.
A five-judge panel sits at C, H, E, B and M. We put a camera at every one of them. That is not an invented camera plan — it is the panel this sport already uses, mechanized. When someone asks why a machine's view should be trusted, the answer is that it is standing exactly where five licensed officials would stand.
It also lets us compute something the sport has argued about for a century without an instrument: what each judging position could physically see. A judge at E and a judge at C scoring the same movement differently is not necessarily a disagreement. It may be geometry. Now it can be shown.
The sixth camera covers A, the panel's own blind spot. The seventh looks straight down, where there is no depth ambiguity at all and all four feet are visible at the halt.
The center of the arena, and of the business
Every certified arena runs the same seven cameras and produces the same stream of numbers. Which means six of them, two thousand miles apart, are not six shows being reported to one another — they are one show, cut live, with the same leaderboard and the same measurements on every ride.
Forty-two 8-megapixel cameras, six switches, six compute nodes. That is the entire capital cost of a nationwide live competition network — less than one production truck rents for in a weekend.
Ride times stagger across the six arenas so there is always a horse in a compelling movement somewhere. No other sport can schedule away its dead air, because no other sport knows what is about to happen. A dressage test is a published script — movement, letter, gait, order — and the only unknown is tempo, which we are measuring live.
Five of them stand exactly where a five-judge panel stands. One covers the panel's own blind spot. One looks straight down.
How a score is built
We never hide one inside the other. The measured score and the judged score both appear on every sheet, with the camera tier and the calibration residual stamped beside them. A Tier III result is never pooled in a class with a Tier I result.
| Class | Score of record | Cost | Result in | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Measured | M only — accuracy, rhythm, tempo, timing | Free – $5 | Seconds | Intro and Basic, where accuracy is most of the score anyway. Runs continuously, no judge to schedule, no cap on entries. |
| Traditional | J only — a licensed human, and nothing else | $25 – $45 | Same session | Riders who want a person's eye and no machine anywhere near their horse. This never goes away. |
| Combined | C = w · J + (1 − w) · M | $30 – $60 | Same session | Championships and qualifiers. The weight w is printed in the prize list before entries open, and it never changes after. |
When the judged score and the measured score disagree sharply, that is information, not a problem. Either the horse did something the machine cannot see — which is most of what matters — or the judge's eye has drifted. We track Δ for every judge, in every class, over time, and we show it to the judge privately before anyone else sees it.
No official in the history of this sport has had an instrument that tells them where their own eye has moved. We intend to be the first people to hand them one. That is why the judges will come with us instead of fighting us.
C is where the judge sits
The ride on the left, the test on the right, marks entered by keypad or by voice. The machine's measurements sit in a side rail the judge can accept, override or ignore entirely — and every override is logged, with a reason, forever.
/judge/deskOur own certification sits on top of the USEF license. A candidate scores a bank of rides that a panel has already scored, and is graded on their spread against it — online, timed, proctored, and the same bank for everyone.
/judge/certifyEvery certified judge re-scores a blind bank each quarter. Drift becomes a number instead of a rumor, and a public agreement rate becomes something a judge can be proud of and a show organizer can hire on.
/judge/calibrationJudges set their own per-ride fee for private scoring and are paid on results certification, not thirty days later. We take a technology fee and no share of any purse, ever.
/judge/earningsPrize money
Entry fees go to riders. All of them. Centerline is paid for by memberships, judging fees, technology fees to show organizers and advertising — never by taking a cut of what the riders put in.
Prize structure, escrow and state-by-state compliance are handled by counsel. Henry Equestrian Centers, LLC is run by a Texas trial lawyer, which is an unusual thing for a horse-show company to be able to say and the reason we are comfortable doing this properly instead of quietly.
Qualifying
Because every ride is a record and every record carries its tier and its error, a rider in Bandera and a rider in Bozeman can be in the same class on the same afternoon, and the result means something.
The arena board
The live ride, cut against a score that just posted two states away. A leaderboard that moves as marks land. The measurement overlay drawn on the horse in real time — the circle it actually rode against the circle it was supposed to ride. Commentary keyed to numbers that exist, instead of adjectives that don't.
Basic Test 2 · Open
A dressage test is a published script — movement, letter, gait, order. The only unknown is tempo, and we are measuring that live. That single fact is why this broadcast can be produced without a truck, a director, or a single camera operator.
The yellow line works in football because the field is a surveyed plane and the cameras are calibrated to it. We have exactly that. So we draw on the arena, live:
Operating cost for six simultaneous venues: one person.
Five doors
Enter shows, ride tests, and keep every score, video and measurement in one permanent file. Upload anything you like, any day, and have it measured for free — or scored by a professional for a small fee, with no show involved at all.
/riderRecord a lesson from the rail, have it measured on the spot, and push the sheet straight to the student's account. Barn roster, progress tracked across months, and a whole class of riders entered in one action.
/barnCertification, the live scoring desk, a public agreement record, private drift reporting, and payment on results certification.
/judgeSelf-serve intake, a rate card you can read without calling anyone, artwork upload, and your own login showing impressions, rides watched, and which classes ran beside your brand.
/advertiseWatch by invitation only. The rider sets the gate — everyone, no one, or a named list. Invited guests get an emailed link and a code and sign in without MFA, because a grandmother in Amarillo should not need an authenticator app to watch her granddaughter ride.
/watchWhat it costs, and how it pays
Full-motion placement on the live board between rides, plus your mark on the leaderboard for the duration of the class. Reported by rides watched, not by guesswork.
Your brand on the scoresheet a rider will open, screenshot and post. Targeted by level, by state, or by discipline. Billed on delivery.
Named on a class series from schooling through championship, on every sheet and every board it touches, with the qualifying pathway carrying your name up the ladder.
Henry Equestrian Centers, LLC
Nobody here believes a computer should decide whether a horse went well. What we believe is that a rider who has just paid thirty-five dollars and waited ten days deserves better than a scanned sheet and a ribbon in the mail — and that a judge who has given twenty years to this sport deserves better instruments than their own memory.
Western dressage is the right place to build this. It is young enough that the habits are not set, its riders are already filming every ride on a phone, and it is full of people who came to it because it rewards correctness over flash. Correctness is the thing we can measure.
Henry Equestrian Centers, LLC is a Texas company. Centerline is its competition platform.
Tracee has been riding her entire life. She rides western dressage, she rides it well, and she rides a horse named Hickory who is, by every account in this family, a very good one.
She is the reason this company exists and the reason it will not overreach. Every claim on this page about what a machine should and should not be allowed to say about a horse has been checked against somebody who has spent a lifetime in the saddle. If she says the instrument is wrong, the instrument is wrong.
Riding record, training background, levels shown and photographs to follow.