Becoming-player Sports Viewing

Third-person video, the spectator's own imitative movement, and vibration at several body sites — so a remote fencing spectator perceives the athlete's movements as their own.

Watching a sport on a screen is a flat experience. This project targeted the sense of being the athlete rather than watching one, using remote fencing as the case: fast, legible, and built on a small number of decisive contacts that map cleanly onto tactile events.

The experience rests on three things at once: third-person footage of the match, the spectator imitating the movements of the athlete they are supporting, and vibrotactile feedback delivered to more than one body site. Felt contact and self-generated movement arriving together is what carries the sense of embodiment.

At the public demonstration, six microphones around the competition floor in Tokyo picked up the sounds the sport is actually made of — the impact of a lunge, the clash of blades. That audio was carried to spectators watching remotely and rendered as vibration through a platform beneath their feet and a handheld device shaped like a sword grip.

A collaboration between NTT Communication Science Laboratories and Nagoya Institute of Technology, demonstrated at the 74th All Japan Fencing Championship (6 November 2021, Roppongi Hills Arena) — an event ICT-supported by the NTT West Group. Published in the Transactions of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan; I am second author.

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