Institute of Sport Science

Research Equipment

Sensorimotor Lab

The Sensorimotor Lab contains a to our knowledge worldwide unique CAVE for the interaction with virtual environments. Participants can move freely in a space of 11.0x6.0x3.8 m, while visual content is rendered stereoscopic and perspectively correct on walls and floors, either as (interactive) animated 3D environments or 360° videos including their associated sound scapes. In combination with a motion capturing system and our fully integrated eye movement analysis system, the Sensorimotor Lab provides ideal conditions for researching complex (motor) behaviour in (interactive) situations close to reality, while keeping experimental control and data quality at an extroordinary high level.

Projection system: Twelve Barco F50-Projektoren project high resolution images onto walls and floors (pixel size 2.35 mm). The camera-supported warp- and blend-Software (Scalable Systems) automates the recalibration and assures a geomety- and color-corrected content presentation without annoying artifacts by unevenly lit edges or blending areas.

Sound system: A total of 32 Genelec BPM 8030 active speakers and four Genelec 7050B Subwoofers are arranged around the motion capture volume in two rings on the ceiling and below the floor. They are controlled by an audio workstation via a digital audio interface (Do.Tec Andiamo, RME HDSPe MADI) and allow for high quality room audio as well as experimental manipulations of the locations of the sound sources.

Rendering workstations: The projectors are driven by twelve workstations, which are integrated above the suspended ceiling. Each workstation creates two WQXGA images on a Nvidia Quadro A6000 GPU and sends this information to the respective projector. The graphics are rendered by a modern game engine, which was extended with research-context relevant features with the support of the Faculty's technology platform.

Optitrack system: The capture of kinematic parameters is done with an Optitrack-3D-Motion-Capture System. Using marker-based tracking, movements can be recorded with high spatial and temporal resolution in a large capturing volume (250 m³), assuring precise motion capture and analysis.

Integrated force plates: Dynamical parameters are recorded by two system integrated force plates working with a frequency up to 1000 Hz. Both plates are mounted on a baseplate which allows - depending on the research question - different dispositions (e.g., shifted one after another for recordings of gait).

Integrated eye tracking: A lightweight binocular eye tracking system based on the Pupil-Labs open source project captures eye movements with a frequency of up to 200 Hz. The synchronous capturing of head movements (Optitrack) and the integration with Streamix allow – contrary to regular video based analyses of gaze data – the automation and the real-time (in-the-loop) use of these analyses.

Experiment management system: The in-house developed experiment management system caters for an intuitive user experience while maximizing control over the experiment. A web based user interface allows the researcher to configure and control all relevant features while the controlled application based on the coordination language Streamix, assures - amongst others - the synchronicity of the data streams.