D-ball: virtualized sports in diminished reality

Abstract

Many video games have been created that virtually represent sports from the real world. We present a new type of sports called "D-Ball", based on ballgames, that uses diminished reality (DR) technology. We created a prototype for a new DR system that uses a head-mounted smartphone to show specific objects and features from the real environment that have been extracted based on their color. Players can only see the balls, lines, and markers attached to players that have this color. D-Ball allows the players to experience a ballgame as if they were in a video game from the 70s. Players can customize their own appearance in D-Ball by changing the colored markers attached to their bodies. Furthermore, the difficulty of D-Ball can be modified by changing the ratio between the completely diminished and the completely real aspects of reality. In this paper, we propose a new method for DR in virtualized sports and discuss the game and prototype design of D-Ball as an example of this method.