Real-Time Interaction with a Humanoid Avatar in an Immersive Table Tennis Simulation

In this paper, we report on the realization of an immersive table tennis simulation. After describing the hardware necessities of our system, we give insight into different aspects of the simulation. In particular, the developed methods for collision detection and physical simulation are presented. The design of the virtual opponent is of crucial importance to realize an enjoyable game. Therefore, we report on the implemented game strategy and the animation of the opponent. Since table tennis is one of the fastest sports, the synchronization of the human player’s movements and the visual output on the projection wall is a very challenging problem to solve. To overcome the latencies in our system, we designed a prediction method that allows high speed interaction with our application.