It has been said that it’s impossible to re-create the atmosphere of LSU’s Tiger Stadium on a Saturday night. However, a team of graduate students in LSU’s Digital Media Arts & Engineering and Kinesiology programs are working alongside faculty, as well as LSU football athletic training staff to create a virtual reality environment that allows athletes to develop their skills in a game-like atmosphere, according to an LSU announcement.
“In the virtual environment, the user will be in Tiger Stadium with a full crowd and full crowd noise,” says Kelley Burger, kinesiology PhD student and team lead on the project. “We hope to even have settings to mimic an 11 a.m. game with full daylight versus a 7 p.m. game with stadium lighting. We have been in constant communication with [LSU football] on what they want the program to look like for their wide receivers, for their quarterbacks, for their linebackers, etc. This will not be some stock program. It will be very LSU-specific.”
The group hopes to have something ready for the LSU receivers to use by March. It would then spend the rest of the semester improving upon the technology and enhancing the visuals with increasingly difficult tasks.
Burger, who is mentored by kinesiology assistant professors Marc Dalecki and Nikita Kuznetsov, says she got the idea for the project while working part time in sports training as she pursued her master’s. She realized the difficulty in replicating game-like environments when working one-on-one with athletes outside of the gym or field.
“It was then when I decided, ‘Hey, every campus has computer programming students and experts, so let’s reach out to them.’” Burger says. “I contacted Marc Aubanel (director of the DMAE program) and he was the one that set me up with this group of grad students.”
Currently, the team is rendering the stadium with photogrammetry techniques, which involves taking existing pictures and video of the stadium to use for measurements in the virtual world. It’s also working with Alison Burkley, an LSU Digital Media Arts & Engineering instructor, to obtain 3D scans of a football, LSU’s uniforms and equipment, and one of the quarterbacks.
“We hope to make more versions of this project for other positions on the football team and for other sports, such as tennis and soccer,” Burger says. Read the full story from LSU.
