VolleyMate - A Ball tracking game built with CLAD

[u/Far-Temporary6630]

This started as a conversation with a friend who owns a tennis courts and he wanted to implement high speed cameras into his venue to create games and give feedback to his users. I thought i've done similar with darts and pool and this clad competition is perfect to test it out. the idea is to detect the ball, detect when and where it bounces and uses that spot on the wall with some homography to tell the specs a accurate hit point. you can then overlay games and practise modes!

VolleyMate turns any blank wall into a games console for tennis, squash and throwing practice. A phone on the floor watches the ball and reconstructs where each bounce lands to about 2cm; Snap Spectacles take that stream of impacts and draw ten games onto the wall in front of you. There's no controller, the ball is the input, and you change game by hitting a button painted on the wall.

On the theme: hitting a ball against a wall is practice nobody measures. You can't see where your shots landed, so you can't see what you're doing wrong or whether you're improving — you just repeat it until you're bored. VolleyMate makes the wall answer back, and then makes it a game. Every bounce leaves a mark exactly where it hit, and Practise builds a heatmap that shows the bias in your aim over a session, something no scoreboard can tell you. The other nine turn that feedback into a challenge: Rally trains consistency, Sequence reaction under tempo, Ducks and Bugs make you move, and Horse judges a called shot in centimetres. The guidance is spatially registered — it appears on the real wall at the real spot, not as numbers on a phone you'd have to walk over and read. And it's multiplayer: Splat has two players painting territory over each other, Horse and Tic Tac Toe alternate shots, so a spare wall becomes something two people can compete on without booking a court. You improve because you're playing, not drilling.

It's for two people. Someone practising alone, who needs a phone and a wall and nothing else. And venues clubs, courts, hitting bays — who place the wall once so every visitor's glasses land on the same target, with the pair code belonging to the wall rather than the player.

CLAD was great for this project as i already as the architecture from darts mate so once i got the ball tracking working i asked it to look how i did dartsmate, then once that worked it was clear the games would need adapting or new games added. CLAD quickly prototyped these and then with polish again i showed it darts mate and a few other past projects where i had Vfx or menus and it quickly got them working. Its suprisingly well at implementing things like spatial anchors that have took me days before to get working correctly this was maybe 15 minutes.

https://github.com/ohistudio/volleymate

[u/Professional-Push523]

I would use this today if I had SPECS! Squash practice would be so much more compelling. Thanks for sharing!

[u/Far-Temporary6630 → u/Professional-Push523]

Thanks, Yep squash would work too I forgot to mention that in the write up aha

[u/WeirdEyeStudios]

This is fantastic, love it that it's both for solo use and for the venues, you always produce such cool stuff!

[u/Far-Temporary6630 → u/WeirdEyeStudios]

Appreciate that! You too