Using Wearable Sensors for Real-Time Recognition Tasks in Games of Martial Arts - An Initial Experiment

Beside their stunning graphics, modern entertainment systems feature ever-higher levels of immersive user-interaction. Today, this is mostly achieved by virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AK) setups. On top of these, we envision to add ambient intelligence and context awareness to gaming applications in general and games of martial arts in particular. To this end, we conducted an initial experiment with inexpensive body-worn gyroscopes and acceleration sensors for the chum kiu motion sequence in wing tsun (a popular form of kung fu). The resulting data confirm the feasibility of our vision. Fine-tuned adaptations of various thresholding and pattern-matching techniques known from the fields of computational intelligence and signal processing should suffice to automate the analysis and recognition of important wing tsun movements in real time. Moreover, the data also seem to allow for the possibility of automatically distinguishing between certain levels of expertise and quality in executing the movements.