During training sessions, sailors rely on feedback provided by the coaches to reinforce their skills and improve their performance. Nowadays, the incorporation of sensors on the boats enables coaches to potentially provide more informed feedback to the sailors. A common exercise during practice sessions, consists of two boats of the same class, sailing side by side in a straight line with different boat handling techniques. Coaches try to understand which techniques are that make one boat go faster than the other. The analysis of the obtained data from the boats is challenging given its multi-dimensional, time-varying and spatial nature. At present, coaches only rely on aggregated statistics reducing the complexity of the data, hereby losing local and temporal information. We describe a new domain characterization and present a visualization design that allows coaches to analyse the data, structuring their analysis and explore the data from different perspectives. A central element of the tool is the glyph design to intuitively represent and aggregate multiple aspects of the sensor data. We have conducted multiple user studies with naive users, sailors and coaches to evaluate the design and potential of the overall tool. (Figure presented.).

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One common way to aid coaching and seek to improve athletes’ performance is by recording training sessions for posterior analysis. In the case of sailing, coaches record videos from another boat, but usually rely on handheld devices, which may lead to issues with the footage and missing important moments. On the other hand, by autonomously recording the entire session with a fixed camera, the analysis becomes challenging owing to the length of the video and possible stabilization issues. In this work, we aim to facilitate the analysis of such full-session videos by automatically extracting maneuvers and providing a visualization framework to readily locate interesting moments. Moreover, we address issues related to image stability. Finally, an evaluation of the framework points to the benefits of video stabilization in this scenario and an appropriate accuracy of the maneuver detection method.@en

While sailing, sailors rely on their eyes to inspect the sail shape and adjust the configurations to achieve an appropriate shape for a certain the weather condition. Mastering this so-called trimming process requires years of experience since the visual inspection of the sail shape suffers from inaccuracies and many times are difficult to communicate verbally. Therefore, this research proposes a visual analysis tool that presents an accurate sail shape representation and supports sailors in investigating the optimal sail shape for certain weather conditions. In order to achieve our goals, we reconstruct the 3D sail shape from point clouds acquired by photogrammetry methods. For incomplete acquisitions we deform a complete template sail to estimate the missing parts. We designed a visualization dashboard for sailors to explore the 3D structure, 2D profiles and characteristics of the time-varying sail shape as well as analyze their relation to boat speed. The usability of the visualization tool is tested through a qualitative evaluation with two sailing experts. The result shows that the reconstruction and deformation of sail shape are plausible. Furthermore, the visualization dashboard has the potential to enhance sailors’ comprehension of sail shape and provide insights towards optimal trimming. @en

Nowadays video plays an important role in the coaching of athletes across many different sports. For sailing training sessions, the videos are recorded from the coach boat and provide ways to review and analyze the training sessions aiming at improving the sailors performance. On one hand, videos are commonly recorded with handheld devices that are rather cumbersome to acquire and are prone to missing many important moments. On the other hand, recordings of entire sessions with an integrated camera in the coach boat are difficult to analyze given their length and the lack of image stability. We present a pipeline to facilitate the visual analysis of these full session videos. We extract manoeuvres as interesting segments, and provide a visualization framework to present the video and processed data. Manoeuvres are extracted by detecting and tracking the boat and sailors. With the visualization tool, the user can locate and visually inspect those manoeuvres for coaching tasks. We evaluated the potential of the framework and from the results we conclude that the manoeuvre detection is reasonably accurate and some coaches see potential in the presented framework.@en