Human Augmentation
Editor: Albrecht Schmidt n University of Stuttgart n albrecht@computer.org

Superhuman Sports:
Applying Human Augmentation
to Physical Exercise
Kai Kunze and Kouta Minamizawa, Keio University
Stephan Lukosch, Delft University of Technology
Masahiko Inami and Jun Rekimoto, Tokyo UniversityH

ave you ever imagined flying
through the sky like a bird, climbing walls like a spider, or playing fictional sports—such as Quidditch in
the Harry Potter books? When we’reyoung, we often role-play and pretend
we have superpowers. Inspired by theseexperiences, we started working on
what we refer to as superhuman sports,
focusing on how we might make someof these powers a reality.
We want to create an application
area to explore human augmentation and enhance human abilities ina playful way. The field of superhuman sports combines competition andphysical elements from traditional
sports with technology to overcome
the somatic and spatial limitations ofour human bodies. The field serves as afascinating application area for humanaugmentation.

Toward SuperhumanSports
Science—in particular, information
technology—is already an integral partof today’s sports training and events.
However, traditional sports emphasize
the achievements of the individual. Sportfederations and competitions struggle
when it comes to knowing how to deal
with the augmented human concept.
Consider, for example, Markus
Rehm, an amputated long jumper with a

14 PER VA SI V E computingprosthetic right leg. He uses a blade-type
leg prosthesis when competing. In 2014,he qualified for the European Championships but wasn’t allowed to compete,1
because his prosthesis was viewed as a
violation of the rules, even though it
hasn’t been proven that the prosthesis
gives him a natural advantage; otherathletes with similar prostheses didn’t
perform so well. 2 This illustrates thecurrent direction and challenges ofallowing augmented humans to participate in conventional sports.
In contrast, superhuman sports aim
to create a field where people compete,
overcoming technological—rather thansolely human—limitations. The focus
is on improving cognitive and physicalfunctions of the human body, creating
artificial senses and reflexes to participate in sports competitions. We wantto create and explore new experienceswith these novel senses and reflexes byaugmenting old sports and designing
new ones, enhancing sports training,and sharing the experiences with both
local and remote audience members.
Superhuman sports exploit human augmentation, using technology to surpass
the physical and cognitive restrictionsof our bodies and enabling superhumansenses and abilities. The core concepts ofsuperhuman sports include augmenting
the body, playing field, training opportunities, and even spectators.

Examples and Experiences
Superhuman sports researchers spana few different disciplines, but mostare focused on the fields of augmented
and virtual reality, wearable computing, and human-computer interaction.
Here, we present some example technologies from these areas.
Body Augmentation
Augmenting the body is the moststraightforward notion. The goal is toenhance a sports practitioner’s inherent
abilities using wearable technologies
and implantables.
For example, Skeletonics lets theuser climb into a completely mechanical exoskeleton so that he or she canenjoy a different body model and new
perspective (see Figure 1a). Bubble
Jumper (or Bubble Sumo) deploys a
combination of skyrunner stilts and a
bubble ball around the player’s torso(see Figure 1b). The goal of the sport isto knock over the other player.
Field or Sport Augmentation
Augmenting the playing field aims to
make the sports more interesting andenjoyable to play—for example, using
projection technologies to indicate
where a play ball might go or converting part of a sports field into a virtualocean. A representative case that one ofus (Inami) has worked on is AquaCave,

Published by the IEEE CS n 1536-1268/17/$33.00 © 2017 IEEE

(a)

(b)

Figure 1. Examples of body augmentation: (a) Skeltonics (http://skeletonics.com) offers mechanical exoskeletons forentertainment, while (b) Bubble Jumper lets participants use stilts and a bubble ball to knock over the opponent.

(a)

(b)

Figure 2. An example of a mixed reality sport: (a) Hado and (b) HadoKart, which moves the mixed reality sport into a motor kart
scenario.

which enhances the swimming experience by surrounding the swimmer withrear-projection acrylic walls, providing an immersive stereoscopic projection environment.3
However, such augmentations canalso lead to entirely new sports. One
example is Hado (http://meleap.com),
where players compete against eachother using a head-mounted display
for augmented reality and a gesturearmband to detect muscle activity andarm movements (see Figure 2). Hado isalready a commercial sport in Japan,marketed by Meleap Inc. These mixed-April–june 2017

reality experiences serve as an inspiration to create new sports.
Another example that one of us(Inami) has worked on, involving more toward state-of-the-art
research, is SpiderVision,4 a wearable device that can extend the fieldof human vision. SpiderVision merges
the view from front and back cameras
on a VR headset to inform users about
activities happening behind them (seeFigure 3). Having 360-degree vision isa valuable skill for any complex teamsport (from football to synchronizedswimming), where formation andrelative positioning of players to eachother matters.
Training Augmentation
Augmented training deploys information technology to improve training
and enhance the inherent capabilities ofprofessional and amateur sports practitioners—for example, using electricmuscle stimulation to build up specificmuscle regions or transcranial direct
current stimulation to improve handeye coordination or other motor tasks.
Another project one of us (Kunze) isexploring aims to alter the clues in ourPER VA SI V E computing 15Human Augmentation

Human Augmentation

(a)

(b)

Figure 3. SpiderVision: (a) the VR headset with rear and front cameras can (b) blend the view of both for the user.

Photoreflectivesensors

Multiplexer

Fio case

Transistor
Arduino Fio and XBee
Li-po Battery

(a)

(b)

Figure 4. AffectiveWear: tracking facial expression of sport spectators using smart glasses.8

perception using smart glasses that influence our motions using projections inour peripheral vision.5 So far, the smart
glasses apply the principle of a “vection field” to alter the speed of a person
walking. Future prototypes might also
encourage slight changes in direction.
To give a couple of examples, the technology could be used during runningcompetitions to regulate and find theoptimal pace of an athlete. In training
situations, we could teach athletes toperform movements (such as changes indirection) with precise timing.
More invasive and futuristic is the useof galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS)
to alter a practitioner’s movements. GVSstimulates the vestibular system using aweak current behind the user’s ear. This
influences the sense of equilibrium so theuser feels like falling toward the anode.
GVS can be used to “steer” people and16 PER VA SI V E computing

influence the user’s perception of speed.6
This technology can augment any sport
relying on a sense of balance or velocity.
Take skiing as an example—applying GVS
in a training situation could better stabilize
the athletes and help them determine thebest body posture relative to the ski slope.
Spectator Augmentation
Augmenting “cheering” focuses on newexperiences for those watching a sporting event. For example, those in thecrowd might feel the adrenaline rushof an athlete before scoring an important point, or they might experience theexhaustion of a marathon runner justbefore he or she crosses the finish line.
JackIn Head is a new device that oneof us (Rekimoto) is working on that hasgiven users an immersive 360-degree
camera view from the sport practitioner’s perspective, with minimal setup.7

Moving away from sharing basic
vision and sound, new technologies canhelp share the “affect” of the sport. For
example, two of us (Kunze and Inami)
are working on AffectiveWear smart
glasses, which can detect the user’s
facial expressions by monitoring thedistance between glasses frame andface using photo-reflective sensors (seeFigure 4).8 AffectiveWear can aggregate the facial expressions of spectators
to help organizers evaluate a sporting
event and to offer a more crowd-likeexperience for home viewers with virtual cheers.
On another level, haptic feedback canprovide more immersion while watching
sports competitions. For instance, theSynesthesia Suit (a project Minamizawa isresearching) gives an immersive embodied
VR experience with 24 vibro-tactile actuators distributed over the entire body.9

Looking toward the 2020Olympics
To promote the concept of superhumansports, we founded the SuperhumanSports Society in Japan in 2015. The
early activities included ideation workshops with designers, art schools, andthe general public working on concepts
for novel sports (see Figure 5). In thenext stage, we’re holding workshops
and hackathons to test technologies andcreate experiences. We already successfully held a Superhuman Sports Expoand several Superhuman Sports Gamesevents, where the broader public tried

www.computer.org/pervasiveHuman Augmentation

(a)

(b)

Figure 5. Working on concepts for novel sports—two pieces from ideation workshops: (a) fusing the human dream of flying witha competitive superhuman sport and (b) augmented sports involving all people disregarding age, physical ability, and cognitive
skills overcoming our bodies’ limitations.

out the novel sport designs, including
Bubble Jumper and Hado.
For Tokyo 2020, we’re creating a
superhuman sports culture. Throughthese efforts, we’re not only creating
new sports and augmenting players,fields, training opportunities, and spectators; we’re also educating creators of
future superhuman sports.
The next steps include preparing forthe first superhuman sports tournament
this year and moving slowly from amateur to professional players. For 2018,a superhuman sports competition isscheduled to be included in the NationalSports Festival in Fukui, and we’re inpreparations to host a Superhuman
Design Competition at TU Delft at theend of 2019 (contact us at s.g.lukosch@tudelft.nl if you’re interested in participating). Finally, in 2020, we plan
to hold a National Superhuman Sports
Championship, and we eventually hopeto make such events international.
Acknowledgements
Some of the authors’ research has been supported byJST Presto. We also thank the Leibniz Center Dagstuhl
for fruitful discussions around enabling technologies
shaping novel research directions at the Dagstuhl Seminar “Beyond VR and AR” (www.dagstuhl.de/17062).

References
1. L. Greenemeier, “Blade Runners: Do
High-Tech Prostheses Give Runners an
Unfair Advantage?” Scientific Am., 5

April–june 2017

Aug. 2016; www.scientificamerican.com/
article/blade-runners-do-high-tech-prostheses-give-runners-an-unfair-advantage.
2. J.-H. Raffler, “Do Prosthetic Legs
Provide Unfair Advantage?” DeutscheWelle, 30 July 2014; http://dw.com/p/1Cm86.
3. S. Yamashita, X. Zhang, and J. Rekimoto, “AquaCAVE: Augmented Swimming Environment with Immersive
Surround-Screen Virtual Reality,” Proc.
29th Ann. Symp. User Interface Software
and Technology, 2016, pp. 183–184.
4. K. Fan et al., “SpiderVision: Extending the Human Field of View for
Augmented Awareness,” Proc. 5th
Augmented Human Int’l Conf., 2014,article no. 49.
5. T. Nakuo and K. Kunze, “Smart Glasses
with a Peripheral Vision Display,” Proc.
2016 ACM Int’l Joint Conf. Pervasive
and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct(UbiComp), 2016, pp. 341–344.
6. N. Nagaya et al., “Visual Perception
Modulated by Galvanic Vestibular
Stimulation,” Proc. 2005 Int’l Conf. Augmented Tele-Existence, 2005, pp. 78–84.
7. S. Kasahara and J. Rekimoto, “JackIn:
Integrating First-Person View with Outof-Body Vision Generation for HumanHuman Augmentation,” Proc. 5th
Augmented Human Int’l Conf., 2014,
article no. 46.
8. K. Masai et al., “AffectiveWear: Toward
Recognizing Facial Expression,” Proc.
ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 EmergingTechnologies, 2015, article no. 4.
9. Y. Konishi et al., “Synesthesia Suit: TheFull Body Immersive Experience,” Proc.
ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 VR Village,
2016, article no. 20.

Kai Kunze is an associate professor at the Keio
Graduate School of Media
Design, Keio University,
Tokyo Japan. Contact him
at kai@kmd.keio.ac.jp.
Kouta Minamizawa is anassociate professor at theKeio Graduate School ofMedia Design, Keio University, Tokyo Japan. Contact
him at kouta@kmd.keio.
ac.jp.
Stephan Lukosch is anassociate professor at theDelft University of Technology. Contact him ats.g.lukosch@tudelft.nl.

M asa hiko I na mi is a
professor at the ResearchCenter for Advanced Scie n ce an d Te chn o l o g y,
University of Tokyo. Contact him at inami@inami.
info.
Jun Rekimoto is a professor at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies,
The University of Tokyo.
Contact him at rekimoto@acm.org.

PER VA SI V E computing 17