Augmented Coach: An Augmented Reality Tool for Immersive Sports Coaching

Video playback is currently the primary method coaches and athletes use in sports training to give feedback on the athlete’s form and timing. Athletes will commonly record themselves using a phone or camera when practicing a sports movement, such as shooting a basketball, to then send to their coach for feedback on how to improve. In this work, we present Augmented Coach, an augmented reality tool for coaches to give spatiotemporal feedback through a 3-dimensional point cloud of the athlete. The system allows coaches to view a pre-recorded video of their athlete in point cloud form, and provides them with the proper tools in order to go frame by frame to both analyze the athlete’s form and correct it. The result is a fundamentally new concept of an interactive video player, where the coach can remotely view the athlete in a 3-dimensional form and create annotations to help improve their form. We then conduct a user study with subject matter experts to evaluate the usability and capabilities of our system. As indicated by the results, Augmented Coach successfully acts as a supplement to in-person coaching, since it allows coaches to break down the video recording in a 3-dimensional space and provide feedback spatiotemporally. The results also indicate that Augmented Coach can be a complete coaching solution in a remote setting. This technology will be extremely relevant in the future as coaches look for new ways to improve their feedback methods, especially in a remote setting.