Actuated Ball Sports

Abstract

Ball sports offer many physical, mental and social benefits, however they each require a different set of attributes, such as basketball hoops, volleyball nets, bowling pins, etc. Thus in order to play each of these ball sports, we need to provide and manually set up each of different attributes. Digital ball sports on the other hand virtualise these different attributes at the cost of losing physicality, however they have the possibility to create non-realistic experiences. Without physicality players cannot use the ball coordination skills they developed over their lifetime.

In this thesis, we combine the tangibility of traditional ball sports with the flexibility of virtual games. Our system allows us to render the different attributes for each ball sport virtual. This allows us to implement multiple games in the real world without the hassle of manually setting up attributes. In this system multiple games can co-exist in a single general-purpose ball sports platform. In order to preserve the tangibility of the ball sport, the ball remains physical. We want to preserve the possibility of using non-realistic experiences often used in digital ball sports such as changing the gravity or the trajectory of the ball. Therefore we use an actuated ball in order to introduce non-realistic experiences into the real world.