Augmented Coach: Volumetric Motion Annotation and Visualization for Immersive Sports Coaching

Remote sports coaching connects athletes to interactive training sessions, despite busy schedules and/or lack of access to local trainers. In current formats, athletes record videos of themselves, which they send to coaches for feedback or use in self-coaching. Additionally, some coaches turn to video conferencing platforms such as FaceTime or Zoom for live coaching. A significant challenge with these methods of remote sports coaching is the absence of spatial analysis capabilities, which hinders in-depth assessment of athletic performance.

This paper introduces Augmented Coach, an immersive and interactive sports coaching system. Augmented Coach utilizes volumetric data to reconstruct the 3D representations of the athletes. As a result, coaches can not only view the resulting point cloud videos of the athletes performing athletic movements, but also employ the system's spatial annotation and visualization tools to gain insights into movement patterns and communicate with remote athletes. Unlike existing tools tailored to specific sports, Augmented Coach explores spatial kinesthetic values shared across various sports through a pilot study and designs adaptable features applicable to diverse sports coaching scenarios. To assess the system's usability, we conducted a user study involving ten users, spanning certified coaches and experienced athletes from various sports, illustrating how they can utilize the system's features to enhance coaching in their respective disciplines.