Mimic

March 6, 2016

How might we provide people with disabilities a liberating sports experience?

Learning to sit-ski can be a powerful liberating experience for wheelchair users and people with lower limb disabilities. It can nonetheless be a difficult task. We paired with several adaptive snow sports associations to radically simplify the learning process, one of the biggest barriers to entry.

Mimic was designed alongside instructors and students. From them we gained a key insight: students learn faster when multiple senses are engaged at the same time. Mimic bridges the gap between instructor and student by providing real-time, accurate visual cues. We scanned and mapped the motion of elite athletes to create a moving image of a sit skier, which is projected in front of the students, guiding their practice. The images are adapted to the student’s expertise and enable them to perfect their technique by imitating the movements.

Mimic was coded in Python and uses gyroscope and accelerometer in the glove to detect the movement of the tutor. This information is relayed back to the sit skier using augmented reality glasses that project an avatar of sit skier. The animation projection was made by mapping nodes on professional sit skier’s body.

Some images of the process:

Credits: Project in collaboration with Erika Laiche, Chema Pastrana, Daniel Walklin

Exhibited at
Imperial RioTinto Sports Innovation Show, Imperial College
RioTinto Paddington Office, London
Smarter, Faster, Tougher Exhibition, Design Exchange, Toronto, Canada
Sponsored by Rio Tinto

Sponsored by Rio Tinto

Innovation Design Engineering, Royal College of Art & Imperial College, January 2014