Rock climbing is a demanding activity that often requires participants to study the route(s) they’ll have to follow before they start climbing. Thousands of books have been written to describe famous and less famous rock climbing routes, clubs (e.g., Club Alpin Français) propose seminars and workshops to prepare climbers etc. The objective of this project is to evaluate how an AR/VR application could help rock climbers prepare their trips, allowing them to study the routes on a virtual but accurate representation of the environment.
The student will have to scan a rock (or several rocks), add route(s) information and play with various systems to study the usability of such systems for rock climbers.
Possible objectives of the project:
- Evaluation of 3D scanning techniques for (natural/artificial) rocks (what is the best technique? how accurate does it need to be? what are the challenges with vertical objects that traditional techniques do not usually face? etc.)
- 3D scanning of some climbing rocks (at least one)
- Design and implementation of various AR/VR solutions to display climbing rocks either using a Hololens (AR) or using a VR headset
- evaluation of their usability and the effort required when using them
- implementation of at least two applications (1 AR, 1 VR) and evaluation of their usability and the effort required when using them
Reading
- “Exploring Rock Climbing in Mixed Reality Environments” (2017). ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System
- “MAAP Annotate: When archaeology meets augmented reality for annotation of megalithic art” (2017). Virtual System & Multimedia