The ability to accurately achieve performance capture of athlete motion during competitive play in near real-time promises to revolutionise not only broadcast sports graphics visualisation and commentary, but also potentially performance analysis, sports medicine, fantasy sports and wagering. In this paper, we present a highly portable, non-intrusive approach for synthesising human athlete motion in competitive game-play with lightweight instrumentation of both the athlete and field of play. Our data-driven puppetry technique relies on a pre-captured database of short segments of motion capture data to construct a motion graph augmented with interpolated motions and speed variations. An athlete's performed motion is synthesised by finding a related action sequence through the motion graph using a sparse set of measurements from the performance, acquired from both worn inertial and global location sensors.
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