Virtual tennis racket uses air jet to recreate feel of hitting a ball

Alex Wilkins

Virtual reality can be used to recreate racket sports like tennis, badminton and table tennis.

Video games such as Wii Sports have used vibrates to give players a sense of hitting a ball in a tennis game.

Mike Chen at National Taiwan University in Taipei says that their work is the first racket that allows you to feel a ball.

The AirRacket is a 3D-printed carbon-fibre controller created by Chen and his colleagues. The AirRacket uses cylinders of compressed air from paintball guns, which can produce strong forces similar to those made when hitting a ball.

The system uses a perceptual illusion to make the force feel bigger than it really is.

The people who tested the AirRacket 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266

The work was presented by Chen and his team at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in New Orleans, Louisiana.

It is exploiting what all virtual reality does, which is trying to take advantage of our perceptual limitations and to trick us into believing some sensation that isn't really there.

The sound of the air jet and the force of the racket trick users into believing they are playing tennis, says swapp.

The sensation of hitting a ball in real life involves a mixture of different sensations in addition to the ball's force. Some users said that the force felt weak for some balls, like those used in tennis. Chen says that future models could produce more specific frequencies for certain sports to increase realism.