Tennis Esports - Best Ball Physics in the VR Tennis Market

Описание

Our aspiration was to create the ultimate tennis experience that feels like you're actually on the tennis court.

Physics is a crucial part of that. We wanted players to not even notice the difference between our virtual game and a real-life strike. So, we aimed to deal with any situation that could occur in a real game, combinations of any ball speed, spin, or racket motion.

The challenge of recreating a real strike is immense. Usually the ball is travelling at fast speeds towards a rapidly moving racket. But due to hardware limitations, there are huge gaps in the information we get. We sample the racket swing multiple times a second, and due to racket speed two consecutive samples can be up to 25 cm apart.

But with our custom continuous collision detection, we are able to bridge that gap. We can accurately estimate what is happening between those samples and predict each hit with precision.

Early on, when evaluating our simulation, we realized that there was a difference between people's perceptions and objective measurements. To truly imitate reality, we needed comprehensive data on ball and racket collisions. Unfortunately, the data available in the tennis science community was incomplete and inaccurate for our needs, so we had to create our own database of measured racket and ball motion.
When creating the simulation, we realized that the state-of-the-art physics engines and existing scientific research couldn't deliver the precision and accuracy we needed. So, we teamed up with the technical university of Vienna to create an immersive user experience when striking a ball in VR.

The main challenge with this project is creating a collision model that is capable of real time predictions of the ball velocity and ball spin after ground and racket impact. Therefore we have to identify relevant effects and associated parameters influencing the impact behavior.
During an impact between a tennis ball and a racket, several effects occur such as strong deformations of the ball, vibrations of the racket and overspin effet to name just a few of them. All these particular processes make the impact a quite complex dynamic programme where existing theoretical approaches are not providing sufficiently accurate models.

With our mathematical model, we could easily simulate different ball types, rackets, and environments. We made it work seamlessly in real-time multiplayer matches on available mobile devices, even if players were on opposite sides of the globe.

Together, we're bringing the court to life like never before!

Download the app: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/4872542182873415/
Website: https://tennis-esports.com/
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/8rcSArKJD4