Overview

Augmented spectator sports experience

Over the last couple of years, we have seen many major advancements in sports broadcasting as well as in the interactivity in sports entertainment. 25 years ago, the first real-time graphics animation of a sporting event was broadcast on television for the Americas Cup, driven by NZ innovation. Nowadays spectators can remotely follow the same event live in real-time using their mobile devices. However, spectators at live sporting events often miss out on this enriched content that is available to remote viewers through broadcast media or online. The main idea of this project is to extend NZ’s lead in this field, visualising game statistics in a novel way on the mobile devices of on-site spectators to give them access to information about the sporting event. We will provide spectators with an enriched experience like the one you see in a television broadcast. Our plan is to use new technologies like Augmented Reality to place event statistic such as scoring, penalties, team statistics, additional player information into the field of view of the spectators based on their location within the venue. While currently we focus more on delivering data to the spectators, this approach could be easily extended for supporting coaches and team analysts. Our research will bring sports events closer to the audience, as well as bringing the spectators closer to the events and the teams.

This project is funded by a MBIE SmartIdea research funding award.

Project Topics

For bringing sports events closer to the audience, we work in an interdisciplinary field covering a wide range of topics:

  • Computer Vision
  • Visualization Techniques
  • Interaction Techniques
  • Machine Learning
  • Sports Technology

Team Members

Our interdisciplinary team consists of members from the Computer Science, Information Science and Physical Education departments of the University of Otago. As well as industry partners.

Stefanie Zollmann

Principal investigator. AR and Visualization expert. Department of Computer Science, Otago University.

Steven Mills

Key researcher. Computer Vision expert. Department of Computer Science, Otago University.

Tobias Langlotz

Key researcher. Mobile Computing, AR and HCI expert. Department of Information Science, Otago University.

Holger Regenbrecht

Key researcher. AR, VR and HCI expert. Department of Information Science, Otago University.

Chris Button

Researcher. Sport Technology expert. Department of Physical Education, Otago University.

Lewis Baker

Postgraduate researcher with focus on Computer Vision, tracking and localisation. Graduated with a PhD in 2021 ( thesis)

Wei Hong Lo

PhD student with focus on Visualisation and User Experience. Graduated with a PhD in 2022 ( thesis)

Shazia Gul

PhD student with focus on Machine Learning and Computer Vision for localisation and tracking.

Patrick Skinner

Master student with focus on Localisation and Tracking.

Michaela Selig

Research intern with focus on mobile prototypes.

Moritz Loos

Research intern with focus on mobile prototypes, Hololens, player tracking, system integration.

Demos

Videos

Wei Hong Lo presenting XRSpectator: Immersive, Augmented Sports Spectating at the 27th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST), 2021


Wei Hong Lo talking about Technical Factors Affecting Augmented Reality User Experiences in Sports Spectating at 27th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, 2021

Wei Hong Lo talking about From off-site to on-site: A Flexible Framework for XR Prototyping in Sports Spectating at IVCNZ conference, 2021

Shazia Gul presting our work on Expert Sample Consensus Applied To Camera Localization for AR Sports Spectatorsat IVCNZ conference, 2021

Wei Hong Lo presenting Who kicked the ball? Situated Visualization in On-Site Sports Spectating at 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)

Publications

Others about us

Our project appeared in several news articles and press releases.

Contact Us

For any inquiries regarding the project or if you are interested to do a PhD with us, please contact us using the email address below.

arspectator(at)cs.otago.ac.nzEmail