Juggling Tutor
 An Augmented Realty Environment
to Teach the Art of Juggling

George Hart, Klaus Mueller, Dimitris Samaras

Master's project:

This CSE523 Masters Project is to create an interactive, multi-modal, virtual juggling tutor environment.  A user who wants to learn to juggle (or wants to learn a new juggling pattern) will face a screen which displays virtual juggling balls in motion. Two cameras track the movements of the user's hands (which are wearing colored gloves) to determine the trajectory of each simulated ball at the moment it is released. The palm of the gloves have a different color from the outside of the fingers, so that the camera can easily detect when the hand opens, triggering the release of a virtual ball held in that hand. The screen displays the ball's computed motion and can also also display a target trajectory so the user can see if the ball is being released at the incorrect time or with incorrect force.  If the hand is not positioned properly to catch the ball in its descent, the simulation displays it falling to the floor and resets to start again.

From personal juggling experience, it is expected that the tactile feedback of feeling the balls land in the hand is important for developing proper timing.  So we will put a buzzer in the palm of each glove to give a tactile impression of contact with the descending ball.  Sound will also be used for this moment of contact.

The user interface will contain a library of different juggling patterns to be learned, and will allow the simulated acceleration of gravity to be adjusted. It is expected that the user will be able to learn a pattern most easily when gravity is reduced, as there is more time to think about how the hands should move.  Then by gradually increasing the simulated gravity to its actual value, it is hoped that the user will internalize the juggling skills.  The goal is to then transfer these skills to real juggling of actual balls.

This concept of motion learning by starting slowly and gradually increasing speed makes sense when once considers how metronomes are commonly used in learning piano pieces.  However, we can think of no previous examples where it has been demonstrated that three-dimensional movement skills can be learned in a slowed virtual environment then transferred to the real world.  ((Do flight simulators ever reduce gravity or slow the simulated adversaries as a teaching tool?))  So this project involves not only the technical aspects of creating the system, but also novel aspects of human-computer interaction and learning.
 

Skills required:

References:

For background information on juggling and what is meant by different "juggling patterns" see An excellent reference book on the mathematics of juggling is: