Catching the Drone - A Tangible Augmented Reality Game in Superhuman Sports

The newly defined genre of Superhuman Sports provides several challenges, including the need to develop rich Augmented Reality (AR) game concepts with tangible interactions and augmentation. In this paper, we provide insights into a Superhuman Sports ball game, where players are able to interact in mid-air, rapidly and precisely with a smart, augmented and catchable drone ball. We describe our core concepts and a path towards a fully functional system with multiple and potentially different display solutions, ranging from smartphone-based AR to, eventually, HMD-based AR. For this AR game idea, a unique drone with a trackable cage based on LED pattern recognition has been developed. The player, as well as the drone will move swiftly during the game. To precisely estimate the 6DoF pose of the fast-moving drone in this dynamic scenario, we propose a suitable pipeline with a tracking algorithm. As foundation for the tracking, LEDs have been placed in a specific, spherical pattern on the drone cage. Furthermore, refinements based on the unique attributes of LEDs are considered.