Digitising Sporting Arenas: The end of an arena!, by Andy Miah. This guy is sharp.

Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian man was groundbreaking for its study of proportion and the human body. The notion of 'reason' governing 'form' was a key philosophical belief of the Renaissance.

Today, however, we are discovering that chaos or irrationality also governs form. With that in mind, I thought it would be funny to see the Vitruvian man playing virtual sport.

In this sketch, he wears VR goggles and wrist/ankle bands that transmit positional information by pinging wirelessly to the game console, allowing for freedom of movement, which I believe would offer a better, less expensive means of achieving true virtual sport status in the basement than that proposed by NoSport, since it removes much of the bulky equipment and therefore many of the constraints (cost, range of movement).

By benchmarking his anatomical position before starting the game and then comparing it to anthropometric data and the positional information during the game (ie. the shift in limb position from red to blue), the Vitruvian man has a position in virtual space. The only thing missing from true virtual sport is the force feedback necessary to make the appropriate proprioceptive responses (now that's a mouthful!).

Such a solution would be inhibited in the near term by processor power, which is chewed up today displaying the immensely rich graphics available in most titles. The graphical demands of virtual environments won't be any less demanding in the future nor will the interface calculations be any less sophisticated. Instead of one joystick with several buttons pressed individually or in combination, there will have to be 15 separate positional relationships (head, wrists, ankles, console) calculated many times a second and then smoothed out over the intervals. Not knowing the technology extremely well, I would estimate that this is only five to seven years away from being a household staple.

It would certainly provide a better use for wireless connectivity than checking sports scores every 8 minutes.