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Body Visualization is the second most important part of our system. This includes how the student and master appear, as well as what perspective the student has on his environment. Items listed in red will are our highest priority, those in black will be done if we have time left.

Superimposing Master on Student
This could be a direct superimposition, or something more stylized, like having only the masters skeleton be represented. The main technological challenge here is in measuring the size of the students body and then automatically scaling the master to be the size of the student. Having just the skeleton represented gives us a "slop" factor. This is both good and bad, it lets us avoid some technological issues like precice scaling, but also means that teaching subtle motions may be more difficult
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Superimposing Master on Student in third person view
This is as above, but the student gets to see him or herself and the master off in the distance. The master and student will still be overlapped, and thus the master will still need to be rescaled to the students size.

Master and Student side by side
As above, but with one or many copies of the student and one or many copies of the master in the virtual environment, and not necessarily superimposed. This gets around the issue of rescaling the master to match the student
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Augmented reality
By putting a small video camera on the students HMD, we can capture a video signal, overlay our virtual master on top of that, and then send that to the students HMD. This gives the student a 100% precise representation of him or herself, but involves a whole host of technological issues that we are not currently familiar with (video capture and compositing, precice registration of real and virtual in that space, matching the video and mocap latencies, etc)

Visualization of opponents and accessories
Often when learning the martial arts the student is asked to visualize either an attacker or some kind of accessory, which is used to explain the movement better (for example, "hold the ball" or "play the chinese guitar"). We could do this one better by acutally presenting those items in the virtual world
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Stereo Video
We should understand what the technological issues, costs and benefits are in rendering stereo video and transmitting that to the student.

 

OVERVIEW | YIN | YANG | THE LAB
ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY CENTER
(c) 2001