Supporting Low Vision Sports Players Using ARTennis

ROLE: RESEARCH ASSISTANT 🔍

DURATION: JUN. 2023 ‑ AUG. 2023 ⏰

TOOLS: FIGMA & YOLOV8 🛠

THE PROBLEM STATEMENT:

Ball-based Sports such as Tennis are Not Accessible to Low Vision (LV) People.

THE SOLUTION:

To Empower LV Individuals to Play Tennis, We Designed an Application for Wearable Augmented Reality (AR) that Uses Real-time Computer Vision to Enhance the Visual Saliency of a Moving Tennis Ball.

The left figure is a first-person point of view of a person playing tennis wearing the VR headset without the visual augmentation. The right figure is also a first-person point of view, but with the visual augmentation, which is the red dot over the tennis ball surrounded by green arrows, that follows the ball in real-time as the ball is hit back and forth.

My Role

I Helped Train a Custom Computer Vision Model, Design Visual Augmentations Based on Co-design with a LV Researcher, Conduct User Study, and Create Figures for the Research Paper.

An overview of ARTennis and its implementation process:

A representation of how a member of the research team who has low vision saw with the Visual Augmentation:

Impact

Our Participant Believes that Our Prototype Will Make Everyday Sports More Accessible :)

Reflection

After Speaking to Someone Who Has Low-vision, I Began to Think Deeper about Accessible Design.

I am grateful that I designed a VR model for a specific audience such as people with low vision since designing for accessibility has always been my passion. I experienced working in a research lab with talented engineers and overcame a technical challenge of training a VR model, and hope to help more people with accessibilty needs with the new skills I learned from the lab. I wish to continue building for those with low vision in the future.

Link to the Published Paper

Click Here for the Published Paper