A student, Xiaoyang Kao, recently figured out how to make his own Olympics-style lane markers. They used CSS3 and the Chrome engine to get it done, which is really impressive.
Can you even tell which one is which?
Looks really close to the real thing! Here's his setup at the local pool:
Amazing and very cool. I'm a huge fan of people who reverse engineer and build their own versions of things.
You should go read about how they did it at their blog.