How Virtual tennis racket uses air jet to recreate feel of hitting a ball ?

A controller called the Air Racket shoots out a burst of compressed air to produce strong forces similar to those produced when striking a ball.

We have developed a modular virtual reality gaming application that can be used to synthesize exercise drills for racket sports. By defining cost terms that are related to the gameplay and the mechanics of the game, as well as by allowing a user to control the parameters of the cost terms, users can easily adjust the objectives and the intensity levels of the exercise drills. Based on the user-defined exercise objectives, a Markov chain Monte Carlo optimization method called “simulated annealing” was used to optimize the exercise drill. The effectiveness of the developed virtual reality gaming application was measured in two studies by using virtual reality table tennis as the evaluation tool. The first study investigated the potential usefulness of the developed virtual reality gaming application as an exercise tool by comparing its workout effectiveness at three intensity levels (low, medium, and high) through the collection of heart rate readings. The second study explored the potential utility of the virtual reality gaming application as a training tool by exploring whether there was any improvement in participants’ performance across the three conditions.

A controller that shoots out bursts of compressed gas can simulate racket sports like tennis, badminton, and table game in a video game.

Until now, video games like Wii Sports have used vibrations to offer players the sense of hitting a ball in simulated versions of tennis.

“It’s completely different from what you’re feeling if you’ll actually hit a ball,” says Mike Chen at National Taiwan University in Taipei. “Our work is that the first racket that enables you to feel that directional force right from the impact of the ball.”

Chen and his colleagues created a 3D-printed carbon-fiber controller called the Air Racket to raised simulate how rackets react to ball impacts. The Air Racket uses cylinders of compressed gas adapted from paintball guns, which may produce instant, strong forces, kind of like those made when striking a ball.

The system relies on a perceptual illusion to create the impact force that feels up to fourfold bigger than it really is. “When you have got an extended force, you perceive the magnitude of that force to be larger,” says Chen.

When people tested the Air Racket within the lab, they reported that furthermore as making the sport feel more immersive, the impact sensations helped them target their shots and feel how well they were hitting the ball.

Chen and his team presented the work at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in the port of entry, Louisiana, on 3 May.

“It’s exploiting what a video game does, which is trying to require advantage of our perceptual limitations and trick us into believing some sensation that isn’t really there,” says David Swap at University College London.

The combination of the sound of the air jet and also the force of the racket also helps trick users to believe they’re playing tennis, says David Swap.

The sensation of hitting a ball, in reality, involves a combination of various sensations additionally to the ball’s force, like vibration and oscillation. Some users reported that the force felt a bit weak for a few of the heaviest balls, like those employed in tennis. Future models could produce more specific vibration patterns and frequencies, and sure enough, sports to extend the extent of realism, says Chen.