Augmented reality-based remote coaching for fast-paced physical task

One popular application of augmented reality (AR) is the real-time guidance and training in which the AR user receives useful information by a remote expert. For relatively fast-paced tasks, presentation of such guidance in a way that the recipient can make immediate recognition and quick understanding can be an especially challenging problem. In this paper, we present an AR-based tele-coaching system applied to the game of tennis, called the AR coach, and explore for interface design guidelines through a user study. We have evaluated the player’s performance for instruction understanding when the coaching instruction was presented in four different modalities: (1) Visual—visual only, (2) Sound—aural only/mono, (3) 3D Sound—aural only/3D and (4) Multimodal—both visual and aural/mono. Results from the experiment suggested that, among the three, the visual-only augmentation was the most effective and least distracting for the given pace of information transfer (e.g., under every 3 s). We attribute such a result to the characteristic of the visual modality to encode and present a lot of information at once and the human’s limited capability in handling and fusing multimodal information at a relatively fast rate.