The core of this project was a interactive stereoscopic 3D tennis serving experience developed in conjunction with Boffswana and Mark, for client ANZ as part of the Australian Open 2011.

Users were invited to try their serving skills against a 'live' video of Australian tennis star Sam Stosur, equipped with a Wii-mote for the interaction. Smart heuristics were written into the application to derive the physical force of each swing of the Wii-mote, combined with a system that made an educated estimation of whether the player was a child or an adult, determined the actual virtual force behind each serve. 

The application required advanced software techniques to deliver fluid playback of Sam's animations as her virtual self responded to the varying degrees of user interaction. 

Accelerometer Sensor Application

This application connected to a Wiimote like device which provided information on how the user was holding the tennis racquet. A number of heuristics were developed to determine the strength of their serve. We adjusted the threshold of the serve appropriately using face recognition technology to determine the approximate age and gender of the user. As a result, a child's serve would be classified as "strong" even though, in absolute terms, it was weaker than the serve from an adult male. 

Interactive Movie Application

Around 30 different 3D videos were shot for this piece, as the piece was interactive, each video needed to be played directly after the previous, without even 1 frame of delay. An intelligent queuing system was implemented for preloading movies and allocating the necessary GL buffers to make each transition as seamless as possible.

Credits

Video courtesy of Boffswana.
Images courtesy of Robert Stock

Director of Design: Steven Van Elst
Executive Producer: Robert Stock
Project Manager: Penny Cai
Creative Technologist: Elmar Trefz
Lead Developer: Adrian Hardjono
Post Production: Simon Bronson
DoP/Stereographer: Stuart Gosling
Sound: Dallas Johnson