Venga!: climbing in mixed reality

Abstract

Scary climbing situations can appear when climbing on big walls. Some stones may be slippery due to humidity or smoothness and distances between belaying bolts can be large whereby a deep fall is risked. In such situations, the stress level increases, climbing performance decreases and an ascent might even be aborted. Furthermore, hazardous accidents can happen when the concentration is disturbed by stress and fear. Moreover, a beginner has to overcome some hurdles such as learning movements and belaying techniques as well as overcoming acrophobia or fear of falling down. We try to facilitate these hurdles with augmentation of the human in Mixed Reality (MR) superhuman sport climbing. In this paper, we present the development of a MR climbing system that tackles these hurdles by allowing a user to climb in safe height at ground level in reality while seeing his or her own body visualised in a much more demanding situation (e.g. in the middle of a big wall) in a Virtual Environment (VE) through a HMD. Additionally an audience can be integrated into the VE via a collaboration with an operator of a virtual drone. The drone operator has the ability to provide additional feedback, e.g. point to a certain stone with a virtual laser and can communicate with the climber via microphone. Hence, if a climber gets stuck in a climbing route, the drone operator can suggest the next move in the VE.