Analysis of climbing postures and movements in sport climbing for realistic 3D climbing animations

Abstract

Recently, sport climbing has become popular throughout the world. Sport climbing is an extreme sport where people climb an artificial wall with various artificial holds using their hands and feet. Technique training related to using hands and feet is necessary for novice climbers, hence we need effective training contents. The purpose of this research is to analyze postures and movements in sport climbing using Microsoft Kinect for realistic 3D climbing animations. A professional male climber participated in this research in order to obtain good movements for the animations. We divided a climbing cycle into four phase and analyzed each phase. The posture and movement data in sport climbing which are analyzed through this research will be used to make realistic 3D character animation. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.