Assisting viewpoint to understand own posture as an avatar in-situation

Abstract

Understanding the correct self-posture is known to improve the performance of motor skills in sports, dance, ballet, walking, and running. However, it is difficult to understand the accurate self-posture and move one's body as intended for imitation or learning, especially in-situation. Based on previous physiological research, we herein propose the addition of a new assisting viewpoint to the human body interface for understanding the correct self-posture without interrupting the training process. This new viewpoint enables the users to see their current posture as a three-dimensional skeletal image that is an avatar which synchronizes with the owner's movements. The Optical See-Through Head Mounted Display (OST-HMD) and Full-Body Motion Capture (MoCap) are used for creating the proposed viewpoint. The position and the angle of view of an avatar is determined by the rotation of the user's head interactively. Moreover, visualizing the avatar's trail helps users to understand how to moved their own body correctly. We conducted several experiments to confirm the avatar system's validity and the availability for an expert athlete. Our results showed that the proposed viewpoint was successful in enabling the user to understand the accurate self-posture in-situation without occurring interruption.