I used to go to summer camp every year, and one of my favorite activities was canoeing. After years of summer paddling and the occasional family “Canoe the New” trip, I graduated to what I thought was a much more exhilarating paddling sport, funyacking.(See ‘inflatable kayaks’, aka duckies.)With all the perks of kayaking but less possibility to get stuck upside down under water, this seemed to me like an innovative improvement to my world of paddling.
Who knew that all these years later, civil engineering students would be working to make technically advanced canoes—with concrete?I thought the advances in canoeing stopped when they went from wood to aluminum?At least I felt secure in the silver metallic ones used at camp.Difficult to bust those babies!
The running segment of the V+R Challenge is officially closed. (You can still play with the Virtual Run application, but as of today it won’t count towards Sports Without Borders support.) To thank you for following us, submitting your virtual run, and cheering Philippe Fuchs on from the virtual sidelines, I’ve selected a special video for your watching and listening pleasure:
Why 10,000 times “thank you”? Because if you add:
• 780 virtual kilometers run by cyber-athletes like yourself
• 8,487 real kilometers run by Philippe Fuchs
• Not to mention the virtual racing kilometers racked up by the McKinley school
• And of course we cannot forget the real kilometers biked and driven by the V+R Boys, Daniel Grassy and Bernard Robutel . . .
Then you have WELL over 10,000 kilometers; so a Thank You for each one seems only appropriate!
The next portion of the V+R Challenge involves scientists from the Scientific Motion Institute. Once there’s news about their 3D study of the human foot, I’ll blog about it on 3DSports.
Changing gears, I thought you may like to see how Google Analytics ranks 3DSports’ most popular blog posts.
In addition to covering the V+R Challenge, I’ve really enjoyed writing about the hidden world of sports and would like to thank those who’ve followed, participated in our conversations, and also to people stumbling upon 3DSports just now. (There are ~ 50 blog posts to discover.)
On a personal note, my “sports innovation” is that I’ve started running, and I largely attribute this to being so involved with the V+R Challenge. I figure if Philippe Fuchs, a 57-year-old virtual reality professor, can run from Paris to Beijing in 161 days, then I should be able to will my 30-something-year-old self to jog around the neighborhood twice a week. “Challenge” is relative after all, n’est-ce pas?
You’re reading this post so you’re probably at least a little geeked-out about the innovations and technologies driving the world of sports. And as a bonus for your interest, I’m going to give you some inside skinny on the below Digital Sports teaser. But please watch it first.
There are several references to Dassault Systèmes in the video. Insiders’ info #1: Mehdi Tayoubi (director of interactive strategy & marketing) is the person closing the VirtuSphere. I’ll sprinkle more insider tips throughout this post.
Here are some photos taken at the exposition’s opening that feature current and former French government officials . . . testing the Virtual Cardio™ Bike (even the ministères are into VR!):
I tried to indicate with Paint the names of the government representatives (see scribble in red; you may need to double click on the photo to see it well).
Photo factoids:
1. François d’Aubertis president of Cité des Sciences. Previously he was mayor of Laval, France and one of the founders of Laval Virtual, and he even once had a run as French ministère of research.
2. Eric Besson, among other government roles, is France’s secretary of state for digital economic development.
3. Fabrice Lourieruns the Cité des Science’s media center, and since the Cité is part of the governmental portfolio, I guess we can count Fabrice as a government rep.
Here’s a shot of François and Eric getting on the bikes.
And here they are in action.
If you go to the expo, you too can ride the Virtual Cardio™ Bike. But there are also interesting workshops, round-table discussions and special events planned for you. Some of the themes that interest me the most are:
• E-sports
• Handisports
• “From Pong to Today, 30 Years of Sports Simulation”
Parfait for 3DSports, non?
But back to the teaser. Remember the guy running inside the VirtuSphere? I run into him frequently at Dassault Systèmes, and he was even at the V+R Challenge kick-off event March 7. His name? Ray Latypov. His role? He’s the inventor of the VirtuSphere and one of our partners.
Last teaser factoid- but this one’s for YOU to answer! The digital runner is running in a digital environment. Remember the buildings? Now here’s the question: how are those buildings linked to Dassault Systèmes, and where are they “located?” (This is a trick question, so stay tuned to see who gets it right!)
Last week the Tour de France began, and through the end of July we’ll experience yellow-jersey-folly. This year marks the race’s 95th edition. How much has the sport evolved in a century?
Well, a lot!
Rather than focusing on cycling innovations that help competitors win, I’d rather talk about two peripheral points.
1. Being a Tour de France spectator has changed a lot, even in just the past few years. I was particularly pleased to see that this year’s official Tour website is quite V+R-esque. Just like you can find out in real time where in the world is Philippe Fuchs, you can catch Tour cyclist gaps in real time. So you don’t need to be on the actual sidelines or be at home glued to your television to keep track. You can stay at work and still follow! There are other cool functions to the official Tour website, notably the wealth of eyewitness videos, and GoogleMaps “StreetView” of the Tour.
2. Smart cycling clothing keeps you safe. Now there’s a new trick to add to your safety regime. In compliment to your bike helmet, you can “be the bike.” Why rely on arm signals or tiny flashing lights attached to your bike when you want to let others know you’re turning? You can wear the Turn Signal Jacket! (Thanks for the tip Jean!) Here’s a short video made by the inventor Leah Buechley that shows how it works:
As far as I can tell, you can’t buy this in a store—Leah generously provides instructions on how to build it yourself! Warning, you may need to exercise a little geekiness to accomplish the task.
Beckham, Zidane, Kahn and Xavi are just a few names that come to mind when you think ‘soccer star.’ Last night during the final Euro 2008 match (Germany 0 – 1 Spain) soccer’s newest star was in play.
I’ll give you a few hints: compact, accurate, high-performing, stylish.
Oh yes, and with German origins . . .
Still stumped? For those of you obsessed with soccer, you have already heard about this star in the news. A bit controversial and especially got under the skin of Germany’s Jens Lehmann and the Czech Republic’s Petr Čech.
Uh huh, we’re talking about the ball! Europass Gloria.
Created by adidas and supposedly designed by German soccer icon Oliver Kahn, the Europass Gloria, a stylized makeover of the Europass, was used as the official ball in last night’s final competition (the Europass was the official ball for all the other Euro 2008 matches). Several sources I found on the Web claim the silver wonder to be the most accurate soccerball ever. Ironic that SoccerBlog.com, the self-acclaimed “world’s leading soccer blog,” published a negative slant on the ball, while giving it the densest technical description/promotion, I found:
“The new ‘Europass’ match ball of Bayer material is supposed to combine outstanding flight characteristics with greater power transmission and control. The ball has 14 panels in the shapes of tongues and propellers and only 24 junction points when assembled. There is a change in the exterior structure - called PSC-Texture. Nubs resembling goose bumps on the surface layer give the ball more power and swerve. The larger surface of attack and contact surface allow the players to control the ball more precisely in all types of weather. ‘PSC’ stands for Power-Swerve-Control, which means optimized power transmission, more spin and greater precision - which makes it sound like something that should be part of a new car engine.”
To hear what the goalies say about it, go to the original post here.
Cha-ching!
The soccer ball is a hidden star of the discipline, but also of business. With annual sales estimated at $40 million in 2001, the soccer ball market is in a competitive league of its own. Aiming to drive technological advancements that result in stars like Europass Gloria, industry leaders (i.e. adidas) have strategic partnerships with sports technology research labs to stay ahead.
A key part of the research being conducted at these labs is (FEA) finite element analysis, a subject I’ve covered before when blogging about adidas’ ForMotion running shoe technology. The labs develop FEA models of soccer balls in order to better understand their behavior, test their performance, and know which design adjustments to make in order to reach ‘perfection.’
Fig.1. A research photograph of a soccer ball (left) and an Abaqus FEA image (right), from Loughborough University Sports Technology Group, demonstrate how realistic simulation can accurately model the different stresses on the fabric panels of the ball when it is bounced against a surface.
You just can’t roll out Europass Glorias without the FEA step.
Fig. 2. Sports equipment makers are increasingly using computer-aided engineering software—such as Dassault Systèmes’ Abaqus Unified Finite Element Analysis (FEA) product suite from SIMULIA—to speed development and enhance the quality of products such as artificial turf, shoes and soccer balls.
What characteristics do you think the next generation soccer ball will have?
Ok, so not your typical word association. I say ‘potato’, you say ‘flying pigs’, now find the connection, right? And here we are yet again in the strange world of unsuspecting associations. You may have read my post entitled “Shark Attack! Immersive 3D and . . . Rugby?”, featuring 3D entertainment technologies as the common ground for Jaws, HDTV and rugby. Now we’re playing the same game, different subjects, and the winning common factor is . . . Virtual Reality (VR) applications.
While people are quick to associate VR with sports gaming applications, you don’t hear much about VR as a valid means to advancing sports played in the real world. I’ve blogged about a new VR indoor cycling training application, the Virtual Cardio™ Bike, but what’s the sports research community doing with VR?
One of the first 3DSports posts I wanted to write was about this very subject. I asked our V+R buddy Philippe Fuchs if he had any material on the matter, and he said something like, “Funny, I’ve written several volumes on VR but haven’t gotten to sports applications yet.” But Philippe has a wide network of friends and colleagues who work in the VR world and he kindly asked Benoit Bideau and Franck Multon to share some information with me.
What I received is a goldmine of information (it’s really like a chapter in a textbook) of how VR is being used to study and advance physical and sports-related activities. The information highlights VR-sports studies covering our favorites like soccer and basketball, but also sports like handball. I’ve found an online version of one of the handball studies Benoit and Franck authored and cite. The title sums it up well, “Using virtual reality to analyze links between handball thrower kinematics and goalkeeper’s reactions”. This is serious stuff. The study was published in 2004 and is available at www.sciencedirect.com. This study follows one published by the same group of researchers a year earlier entitled “Real Handball Goalkeeper vs. Virtual Handball Thrower”.
Here’s a brief excerpt of the VR-sports research content Benoit and Franck sent me. It gives a nice high-level resume of VR sports research:
The techniques of Virtual Reality permit the realization of sports gestures in a virtual environment and are susceptible to provide functionalities that would be difficult or even impossible to obtain during a training session or game:
• Modeling sports activity
• Quantified measurement of sports progress
• Recording sports activity
• Producing analysis of sports activity and its consequences
• Selecting and viewing certain episodes of the simulation to better analyze mistakes
• Understand strategies used by the athlete
One of the principle interests in using Virtual Reality is to allow an analysis of real-time interactions between an individual and a synthetic humanoid within a sports application. These interactions in a virtual environment enable researchers to study the athlete’s comportment (perception-action) in a standardized situation and apprehend biofeedback problems. In effect, Virtual Reality permits you to manage an environment completely under your control. Therefore the bias typically encountered during experiments on man is limited.
Here are a few glimpses of how the handball studies worked, courtesy of Benoit and Franck. Just imagine the real person (pictured below) interacting with the virtual player. Another sort of Virtual Plus Reality Challenge, non?
If you remember anything from this post remember this: Virtual Reality is a valid means to conduct research for advancements in sports, medicine and psychology. No wonder I keep getting flooded with VR Google Alert links that read like, “Virtual Reality Therapy May Help PTSD Patients”. From Wii to the better understanding and treatment of phobias, to improved handball training, VR is proving itself to be far more useful than you’d imagine . . .
Worldwide
