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V-Pong: An immersive table tennis simulation

Article in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications · July 2006

DOI: 10.1109/MCG.2006.92 · Source: PubMed

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Guido Brunnett Stephan Rusdorf

Technische Universität Chemnitz 3D Insight GmbH
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Technische Universität Chemnitz
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 V-Pong: an Immersive Table Tennis Simulation
Guido Brunnett and Stephan Rusdorf
Computer Graphics and Visualization, Chemnitz University of Technology

Most applications for immersive virtual environments are
built to allow slow or medium speed user interaction.
Examples of this kind of interaction include: changing the
position of an object, triggering an action or setting a
control parameter. To broaden the range of application for
VR systems it seems necessary to integrate technologies
that allow faster movements of the user in a virtual
environment. This raises the question what response times
can be achieved with VR systems built from standard recent
hardware components. To answer this question we decided
to realize a table tennis simulation because this game
involves very fast movements and has moderate space
requirements. In this article we report on the realization of
our immersive table tennis simulation V-Pong that has been
presented on major events as IEEE VR2005 and Cebit2006.
of which with a native resolution of 1024*768 pixels and a
brightness of 3000 Ansi Lumens. Each beamer is mounted
to custom mechanics supporting 5 DOF adjustment. This
allows an exact positioning of the left eye beamer’s optical
system to avoid geometric distortions, e.g. keystoning.
Since we are able to align the tiles exactly we do not need
to deal with edge blending and overlap areas. For
separation between left and right images we use a linear
polarization filter system with 72 percent transmission of
the pre-polarized light sent from the LCD beamers. Circular
polarization can be done by adding a quarter plate to the
filter system.

1. HARDWARE
The hardware for this application consists of three major
components: the projection system, the tracking system and
the application host.
Obviously a front projection system is not appropriate for a
simulation where the user performs fast movements in front
of the projection wall. Therefore we realized a rear
projection system based on standard components. To
achieve the sensation of immersion the projection wall has
to be quite large. Consequently we constructed a frame to
hold two acryl glass panels yielding a single screen of
dimensions 4x3m. To reduce weight we use relatively thin
glass with a thickness of 5mm. From the different types of figure 1: rear projection with 8 beamers
panels we chose the medium ones (gain 2.5, half angle 52
degrees) to achieve the best compromise between visual Each projector is driven by one graphics pipeline using
quality, contrast and viewing angle dependency. digital signaling (DVI). The necessary parallel rendering is
For the first version of the projection system we used only done on 8 GeForce 7800GTX graphics cards. Therefore 8
two LCD beamers. As a result the pixel raster could be seen PCs are connected with 2 separate copper Gigabit networks.
by the player and the brightness was to low to play under Since our Virtual Table Tennis is a single instance
daylight conditions. For the second version we subdivided application we had to develop a parallel GL rendering
the whole display area into four tiles to achieve a suitable interface based on the Chromium framework. Thereto we
resolution as well as an adequate brightness for daylight added some new functionality to the Chromium framework
presentations. For the tiled display we had to develop a low to allow fast and synchronized rendering.
cost projector array as well as a rendering cluster to drive
this mosaic. When driving tiled displays using a sort-first configuration
based on the Tilesort stream procession unit (SPU) the
Each screen tile shows stereoscopic image pairs of the performance bottlenecks are the high utilization of the
corresponding frame area. To project the stereoscopic client host caused by the expensive sorting and bucketing of
images we use per tile two PLC-XU58 LCD projectors each geometry and the high bandwidth consumption caused by a
significant amount of redundant unicast transmissions. We
addressed these problems with an implementation of a true
point-to-multipoint connection type using UDP multicast.
In addition we integrated different optimizations to
eliminate the transfer of redundant information. As a result
our parallel interface allows to render large scenes
synchronously on an arbitary number of tiles at nearly
constant performance [2].
The application runs on a separate standard pc with a 3GHz
PentiumIV processor and an nVidia Quadro or ATI X600
graphics board. This computer is also used for the tracking
software.
The table tennis application requires two targets to be
tracked: the polarization glasses and the table tennis racket
(fig. 2). For the tracking we use 4 ARTtrack1 cameras This
system requires a minimum of 4 markers per target but to
achieve robust tracking 6 markers are used for the racket.
We let all markers stick out on the same side of the racket.
This allows to put the racket on a table when the game is
over. For the glasses we use a standard target construction
with five markers.
figure 2: the two objects with installed tracking target
In contrast to common VR applications where the user
stands relatively still and makes only slow movements with
his hands or arms the table tennis sport involves fast, wide
range movements. This is an important aspect when it
comes to tracking. In such an application the probability of
marker occlusion of a tracked object is much higher. If
there are not enough cameras installed, this results in a less
reliable tracking process. The tracking works reasonably
well with three cameras but we achieved considerably more
reliable results with four cameras. Any additional camera of
course improves the tracking even further but the gain in
quality is quite small.
2. Basic Software
The table tennis application is based on our scene graph
library V3D which consists of modules for the user
interface handling and the underlying render engine [1].
V3D is system independent and runs on Windows, Linux or
Unix. The most important advantage of our system is that
we have full access control of all components. We are able
to integrate new algorithms at any level of the library. To
achieve high performance it is possible to optimize certain
routines for a special purpose.
For the rules of the game a special plug-in has been created.
To control the set-up of the game we provide intuitive
interaction techniques. The user can use the second hand to
adjust the level of the game with a simple device that uses
three thimbles attached to the thumb, the middle and the
index finger. Reset and Replay can be triggered by certain
gestures of the player .
figure 3: the virtual jogdial and its degrees of freedom
The virtual environment is completely defined by an
external scene that is loaded by the application. This has the
advantage that the environment can be easily changed (e.g.
replacement of the table) or extended to achieve a nicer
visual appearance. A map is used to assign their game
relevant meaning to the important objects of the scene (e.g.
object 7 is the ball).
Sound data can be defined in order to give a realistic audio
feedback. Currently we use our own implementation of
spatial audio calculation which supports Prologic Surround
and the Doppler Effect. It is well known that audio
feedback is an important aspect to achieve immersion into a
virtual environment. For the table tennis we found that the
performance of the human player decreases, when audio is
disabled
3. Physics and Game strategy
The integrated physics engine has to deal with the following
major aspects of the simulation: the movement of the ball,
the modeling of a collision and the game strategy. We
distinguish two possible ways of movement for the ball:
flying and rolling. For the simulation of flying we consider
the influence of gravity and air resistance. Since we deal
with an extended object we include the influence of the spin
on the movement of the ball (Magnus effect). Between two
collisions the ball moves on a defined path that is
determined by initial conditions which are the result of the
last collision.
Although for the table tennis game it seems not really
necessary to model how the ball rolls over the table, we
found that this feature improves the sensation of immersion
and thus affects how much the player enjoys the game.
The physical simulation of a collision is invoked by a
module responsible for the detection of collisions. Note,
that in the game simultation only six objects are involved:
the ball, two rackets, the table, the net and the ground.
Furthermore, we can simplify the collision detection by
only computing collisions of the ball with the five other
objects. All other collisions can be neglected. However, it is
necessary to compute all collisions that occur within the
time interval between two frames. For example it is possible
that the ball touches both the net and the table within this
period. Therefore we need to determine the first intersection
that is going to occur in the relevant time interval. Based on
this collision the movement of the ball is recomputed and
another collision search is started for the remaining time
interval.
The user acceptance of the table tennis application very
much depends on the behaviour of the virtual opponent.
This simulation proceeds in the following steps. Based on
the conditions set by the last collision the virtual opponent
precomputes the movement of the ball. The implemented
game strategies suggest a target position for the return.
Then the racket movements necessary to perform this return
are computed. As in real life an enjoyable game takes only
place when both players are nearly on the same level. In
order to avoid that the virtual player makes all points one
has to integrate strategies to reduce his skills. As known
from other game simulations (e.g. chess) we realized
different skill levels for the opponent that can be chosen by
the user. By reducing the level the user takes influence on
the different properties of his opponent. One important
factor is the height above the net that is chosen for the
return. Other factors include the maximum speed of the
racket and an artificially introduced time delay. This delay
involves a constant value that corresponds to a reaction
time and a variable value that depends on the distance the
virtual player has to move to perform the return. This delay
time may cause the player to miss the ball or to hit it at a
different position as intended. Furthermore, we included a
random noise function in the computation of the parameters
for an optimal return of the ball. The amplitude of the noise
function is decreased for higher game levels but increases
over the time the ball is played without interruptions. This
intends to model an increasing likeliness of mistakes when
the ball is successfully returned for a long time.
4. Prediction
The major difficulty in the design of this application is the
synchronization of the players movement with the visual
output. Our system consists of several components each of
which contributes to the delay between the movements of
the real objects (e.g. the racket) and the corresponding
visible feedback at the screen.
To explain why latency is a big problem we note that a
racket speed of 15 meters per second (which is very
difficult to achieve for a non professional player) and a total
latency of 100ms in the system would result in a maximum
error of more than one meter in the racket position. This
illustrates the need of correction algorithms.
The analysis of our system revealed the following latencies:
20 ms due to the tracking system, 20 ms due to the beamers
and about 10 ms for the data processing and visualization.
In addition there is a variable component less than 17ms
due to an unavoidable asynchrony of the tracking and data
processing.
In order to cope with the latency the system has to predict
the movements of the tracked objects (racket, glasses) over
this duration. We predict the position for the glasses and the
racket based on their velocities and acceleration values in
the last three measurements [3]. In addition to this the
algorithm takes into account some simple movement rules
for the human body. For instance it is not possible to move
the hand out of the range of the arm or to rotate the hand at
any angle. To minimize the prediction error a maximum
velocity and acceleration for translation and rotation can be
set. Such properties help to remove peaks in the prediction
system.
Prediction
mm Position (Z) Real
1400 Collision
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0 ms
37885
37933
37981
38028
38076
38124
38172
38220
38269
38317
figure 4: position prediction diagram of a racket
movement
Figure 4 shows the position prediction diagram for the z
coordinate (approximately the distance to the screen) of a
moving racket. The x-axis shows the simulation time in
milliseconds. The ball was hit at 38105ms. It can be
observed that the predicted movement has higher energy
and more jittering. But it’s clearly noticeable that the error
between real position and predicted position at the time of
collision is very small.
 5. Results and Perspectives
With our implementation we have shown that the high
requirements of a table tennis simulation can be met with
recent hardware. We presented the system at events as
IEEE VR2005 and Cebit06. At these instances we found
that users with no experience with VR environments can
use our system without any introduction. The reason for this
is the closeness of our simulation to a real table tennis
environment. This is achieved by the realistic video and
audio output and the familiar input device. The complete
environment is immediately accepted by the users. Users
who are familiar with VR environments are mostly
impressed by the fast response of the system. The third
group of users is formed by the table tennis players. They
confirmed the nearly realistic behavior of the system with
respect to the ball motion including the influence of spin.
However, since they perform much faster movements than figure 5: VR 2005, March 12-16th 2005, Bonn-Germany
other users the limits of the simulation with respect to
correct prediction become obvious.
We realized that the sensation of immersion created by our 6. References
system is very high. Very often we noticed that users tried
to put the racket on the table after finishing the game. [1] S. Rusdorf, M. Lorenz, S. Wölk, G. Brunnett: Virtualiti3D:
Sometimes very enthusiastic players hit the screen with the A System-Independent, Real Time-Animated, Three-
racket. These incidents indicate that the player seems to Dimensional Graphical User Interface, Proc. of IASTED
forget what the environment really looks like. Conf. on Vis., Imag. & Image Proc. 03 , pp. 955-960, Acta
Press 2003, ISSN 1482-7921.
Further developments will concern the distribution of our
[2] Lorenz, M., Brunnett, G.: Optimized Visualization for Tiled
application to allow two remote human users to play against Displays, Proc. of Eurographics Symp. on Parallel Graphics
each other. For this it will be necessary to cope with the and Vis. 2006, see also: Technical Report 02/06, Dept. of
network latency. Furthermore, we plan to realize a table Comp. Science, Chemnitz University of Technology, 2006,
tennis simulation with multi-user support on a single screen. ISSN 0947-5125.
This will allow us to realize table tennis doubles. We also [3] Rusdorf, St./Brunnett, G.: Real Time Tracking of High Speed
intend to integrate a haptic feedback for the ball collision Movements in the Context of a Table Tennis Application,
with the racket in our simulation. Proc. ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and
Technology 2005, pp. 192-201, ACM 2005, ISBN 1-59593-
098-1.

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