SAIVA 2020-2022 (ongoing)
A VR football education software system
Website: Official SAIVA website
Made by: A small interdisciplinary team of designers, programmers and sports experts
Development time: 2 years (ongoing)
My Tasks: Animation system programming, user interaction design, software system design, planning & scheduling,
technical direction at motion capture sessions
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SAIVA is a VR software product in which football coaches and players can come together in online tactics training sessions. Through the immersive experience of VR and by viewing any football situation from any perspective, knowledge transfer is made more effective and a deeper understanding of the tactics as well as each others' perspectives can be achieved.
Using Easy Sports Animation, coaches can create complex scenarios that are then being interpreted by the software to play them back with realistic motion-captured sports animations and dynamic ball movements.
SAIVA's variety of communication tools allows coaches and players to draw, speak through voice chat, create passing & dribbling lines as well as showcasing precise measurements of distances.
Making of
 Receiving a ball at precisely the right spot |  Goalkeeper interaction with the ball, facilitated through my animation system |
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 Motion field blend tree setup to make the characters move at any speed and in any direction |  Complex, detailed blend trees allow me to logically pick the correct animations for any given situat |
 Discussing planned motions with our motion capture talent |  For capturing real life motions in SAIVA, we used XSens MVN Animate |
 Defining rules for goal-kick animations |  Measuring every part of SAIVA's field for programming and communication purposes |
 Initial layout draft for SAIVA's scenario browser |  Layout concept for the session invite menu |
 Early version of the VR-keyboard I made for SAIVA |  Showing an early demo at a sports business convention |
SAIVA has been the first piece of non-game software that I worked on and while certain things have been similar, some others, such as designing for people who aren't used to games or even technology and digital applications have required new ways of thinking.
While working on SAIVA at Turing AI Cultures, I had the opportunity to create a sophisticated animation system for motion captured football animations. From the initial plans to organizing and directing recording sessions to communication with the animator all the way to implementing all motions into an interconnected system, I went through the whole process. In the video below, you can see me in the background, handling the recording computer.
Furthermore I got to work in an even more interdisciplinary team than usual in software and games, due to the collaboration between developers and sports domain experts. This really elevated my communication skills to a higher level.
While working on SAIVA, I got the freedom and responsibility to plan and schedule tasks for myself and occasionally also for fellow team members. For a complex software system like SAIVA, this required quite a bit of analysis and organizational capabilities.