I don’t care what others think about Disney Research’s study into catching a real ball in virtual reality, but me think it could be an advancement in cheating in real life. How? Imagine you are having trouble catching ball pitched in a baseball game or maybe even in a game of football, then this development could actually help you in picking up the skill real quick. But wouldn’t putting on a VR headset blind you from the outside world as it is, after all, not augmented reality?
Well, that’s the beauty of this development by Disney Research. Instead of me regurgitating the story, here’s the gist of what the whole research is about:
“We present a system enabling users to accurately catch a real ball while immersed in a virtual reality environment. We examine three visualizations: rendering a matching virtual ball, the predicted trajectory of the ball, and a target catching point lying on the predicted trajectory. In our demonstration system, we track the projectile motion of a ball as it is being tossed between users. Using Unscented Kalman Filtering, we generate predictive estimates of the ball’s motion as it approaches the catcher. The predictive assistance visualizations effectively increases user’s senses but can also alter the user’s strategy in catching.”
See what I mean now? It is like the cheat code catching a ball game. Although, Disney Research did not explicitly state the applications or the purpose of this development, but it is not hard to imagine transferring this technology to AR and in future, have it on contact lenses, and nearly everyone can be as a good catcher as say, Buster Posey. Hell, in fact, I could easily see the technology applied to other trajectory dependent things too, like tennis for example.
You can read entire research paper HERE.
Image: Disney Research.
