Are You for Real? Engineering a Virtual Lab for the Sports Sciences Using Wearables and IoT

In tertiary education, disciplines such as sports science that require experimental components in their courses represent a significant challenge for online and distance education. This paper demonstrates the design and construction of an enriched experiment, together with the prototype software solution which can all be operated remotely using a web-based client. It presents research that investigated how to visualise data from internet of things (IoT) sensor devices (inertial sensor) used for tracking football sideline throw-ins. In this simple experiment, data was collected from one footballer, fitted with a single inertial sensor. A two-dimensional (2D) video, three-dimensional (3D) motion capture system and inertial sensor were all used to detect the release point of a sideline ball throw-in. In this project, inertial sensor data was used to create a 3D model using web graphical language and three.js.