AR CASE STUDY
GP BULLHOUND NORTHERN TECH AWARDS
OUR PROJECTION MAPPED SETS FOR GP BULLHOUND’S NORTHERN TECH AWARDS HAVE RANGED FROM POINT-CLOUD POOCHES TO ART NOUVEAU FLAIR.
[EVENTS]
[ANIMATED STINGS]
[x 1 AWARD]
CLIENTS & TECHNOLOGY
Chelsea Football Club enlisted Draw & Code to use our knowledge of augmented reality and AI to help create a football training app that allows fans to learn football skills at home. This would use augmented reality to train players in skills including dribbling, passing and shooting.
The concept behind adopting AR for training was that the visual AR output can be used as a guide for setting up specific training practices, while the computer vision processing can allow the training exercise to be evaluated by the app.
The app was being co-developed by Chelsea Digital Ventures and Draw & Code’s specific experience with AR was sought to help create what would be a very advanced and ambitious new concept in training.
For this project, we used Unity’s AR foundation framework. A combination of tracking methods were employed to allow the app to understand the movement of the player. These consisted of plane tracking to ascertain where the ground is, object tracking to follow the movement of the ball and skeletal tracking to understand the movement of the player. This followed the initial set-up process that involved the app assisting the player to place the cones accurately to designate the play area. The placement of cones in the physical play space allows the software to track parameters such as time and distance between the cones.
The AI image processing framework of the app was trained to track and understand the player’s ability to carry out certain tasks within a practice session using skeletal data provided by AGT.
The guide animations were captured with football professionals donning Rokoko camera-less motion capture suits. The resulting animation data was applied to stylish, low-poly models of players to help build reference animations to show how the drills should be performed.
This sophisticated use of AI and augmented reality to train players brings some of the coaching expertise from a major Premier League club into the home. Technology is ideal for disseminating knowledge and in this case it allows the expertise of Chelsea Football Club to be utilised in the home using commonplace mobile devices. The drills were all designed by football professionals, not only giving access to advice but also crucially to feedback.
Bringing the training ground into your own home using computer vision technology means a minimal technical set-up can become an extremely low-cost but effective way to measure football performance and improvements. Using AI in sports for training is a no-brainer, there really is no other way to achieve the same results without having access to the coaches themselves.
