Many fields (sports training, rehabilitation, virtual prototyping) require intuitive, rapid and unambiguous communication of movement information. In sports, for example, one of the biggest challenges for a coach is transmitting recommendations to athletes. Indeed, effective communication is crucial to ensure rapid and continuous progress. The ideal solution would be for the coach to create the desired 3D movement intuitively and show it directly to the athletes. At present, however, there is no technology offering this possibility. As a result, communication of a specific 3D movement is done using degraded intermediate representations such as speech, text or video. This makes the transmission of information complex and confusing, especially for small adjustments.

This calls for a new paradigm in which 3D motion is created and displayed directly, intuitively, quickly and unambiguously. This project therefore proposes to lay the technological foundations for using 3D motion as a direct means of communication. In particular, we will create a demonstrator enabling :

1. Creating 3D movements intuitively: the HE-Arc Imaging group, and in particular the principal applicant, has already built 4 prototypes using 3D movements for the sports industry (running, ice hockey and squats). These prototypes all suffer from significant limitations, such as the lack of intuitive controls for generating 3D movements. These limitations will be overcome during this project by implementing advanced statistical models such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Variational Autoencoder (VAE).
2. Displaying generated 3D movements, along with relevant visual cues: HEIA-FR’s HumanTech Institute specializes in the design and analysis of Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) with the aim of improving the quality of life and well-being of human beings. In particular, their experience in this field will enable us to design and validate the use of visual cues superimposed on 3D movements to ensure efficient transmission of information. In addition, the use of graphic tablets to draw movement will be studied.

This project will be carried out in collaboration with the CHUV’s Swiss BioMotion Lab (SBML-CHUV) and Sports Medicine. These partners are already working on a world-unique system for measuring and analyzing real-time 3D movement in an immersive environment (cave). They are interested in the present project because it complements their efforts in this field. In addition, it will provide an integral system for the proposed research.

At the end of this project, we will have:

• Developed unique expertise in the highly promising fields of 3D motion measurement, analysis and correction.
• Build a demonstrator to attract external funding (SNSF and Innosuisse) and industrial partnerships.
• Consolidate existing partnerships, and in particular strengthen collaboration between the SBML-CHUV, the HumanTech Institute of the HEIA-FR, and the HE-Arc imaging group.

In the long term, the system will be deployed for several sports as well as for rehabilitation and virtual prototyping.