Development of a virtual sports machine using a wire drive system-a trial of virtual tennis

Abstract

We explore possibility of virtual tennis in this paper. To realize virtual tennis, it is necessary to provide our hands with reaction forces from a tennis ball. Moreover, we need a head mounted display which is capable of showing moving objects with high speed. In this paper, we develop an equipment which makes reaction forces at a grip of a tennis racket. In the developed equipment, several wires are radially stretched from the grip in order to produce force and torque vectors with six degrees of freedom. The motion area of the proposed system is made clear at first. A novel method to determine wire tensions which is suitable for real time calculation is proposed. Finally, a basic experimental result is demonstrated.