Re-enacting Football Matches in VR using Virtual Agents' Realistic Behaviours

Weilai Xu, Ismail Alarab, Charlie Lloyd-Buckingham, Steve Bowden, Benjamin Noer, Fred Charles, Simant Prakoonwit, Andrew J. Callaway, Shelly Ellis, Chris Jones

Abstract: Football (or Soccer) ¹ matches are often analysed from 2D video footage that lacks any spatial details of the players on the pitch. On the other hand, the real-time positions of the players derived from recorded tracking data are not easily understandable without an immersive and effective visualisation of the players located on a pitch with the ability of the system to review actions over a timeline. To address some of these drawbacks, we propose a novel "Believable Agent Behaviour" (BAB) engine, based on virtual reality equipped with artificial intelligence for the generation of realistic virtual agent animations to enact the data-driven events from football matches. This system implements an immersive, interactive, believable, and automated end-to-end simulation to analyse and replay a football match using immersive 3D graphics.