2019-06-03T13:21:35 02:00

Virtual Reality in professional sports: from DFB & NBA to Olympics

In this article you will learn:

In which areas VR is used in professional sports
Which athletes and teams use the technology and how
whether virtual reality training can improve the performance of athletes

Virtual Reality is being used more and more in real life, not just in entertainment, but also in medicine, education, fitness centers, and even professional sports. What kind of athletes are already training with VR and how are they using the technology?

VR in professional sports - from training to injury prevention

Video recording has long had a firm place in professional sports. Whether it's soccer teams, sprinters or tennis players - athletes from a wide range of disciplines use video footage as an analysis tool to hone tactics, posture or technique. With the help of virtual reality, athletes and coaches can gain an even more accurate, immersive picture of past matches or training sessions than with 2D videos.

But VR also holds a lot of potential for training itself. For example, athletes can train certain movement sequences in VR without having to stand on the training ground or playing field. Compared to normal "dry runs," virtual reality offers audiovisual feedback that can simulate real game situations. This high degree of immersion increases the training effect.

VR training of this kind can also reduce the risk of injury during training sessions. This is especially true for sports like American football, where a lot of physical contact is inevitable during "real" training. Speaking of football, the sport increasingly made negative headlines in 2018 because studies of the brains of deceased NFL professionals revealed that almost all suffered from the degenerative brain disease CTE.

This is possibly a result of the violent collisions the pros are constantly exposed to in games and practices - easily resulting in concussions that are not always diagnosed immediately and correctly. Eye-Sync aims to counteract this situation.

This is a VR goggle based on the , which can track and analyze the eye movements of potentially affected players using a standardized test.

This procedure provides indications of a possible concussion in a very short time, so that those affected can be treated quickly and, above all, do not continue training. In addition to some American college football teams, the NBA's Golden State Warriors basketball team also uses Eye-Sync to protect its players.

Virtual reality training in the NBA

However, the Warriors, currently one of the strongest NBA teams, are not the only sports high-flyers using virtual reality. In the field of VR training for top athletes, the US company STRIVR has now made an international name for itself. As a VR platform for their applications, the Americans use the , but versions for other headsets like the are being planned.

With the Washington Wizards and the Detroit Pistons, two NBA teams use STRIVR for training purposes. How exactly does it work? One possible application is free-throw training, for example. Here, players watch video recordings of their own free throws in VR, and they can choose between a first-person view and various 3rd-person perspectives.

Andre Drummond of the Detroit Pistons began using this training method after a season in which he hit only a third of his free throws - a subterranean rate. In an interview, he revealed how he hopes to improve through VR training:

[The free throws I watch in VR] are all hits, of course. So I'm looking at the same shot over and over again, and then when I'm actually on the court, it just feels very familiar: I just know I can hit the pitch, and that's just what I had to convince myself of.

The VR free-throw visualization tool takes advantage of a neuroscience concept about learning. This states that training to improve skills works best when it provides the learner with the appropriate perceptual input. STRIVR aims to achieve this with a 1-to-1 mirroring of its own converted free throws.

American Football: extra playing time thanks to VR

STRIVR has developed a similar training method for American football. The kicker for Stanford University's college football team also uses virtual reality to practice field goals. This is especially important in light of the fact that the U.S. football associations strictly limit how long teams can practice. It is therefore not even possible to sufficiently train all game situations with all players involved.

For field goal training, the kicker first makes a few field goals under real training conditions. At the same time, he wears a device with a special camera on his body that records the action. He can then view these recordings later in VR and repeat the movements as often as he likes - without having to stand on the field with other players.

For quarterbacks, there are similar training simulations in virtual reality. Players who are not normally part of their team's starting lineup benefit from this in particular: They usually get rather little "real" training time with their teammates to improve their game.

On the virtual soccer pitch with the DFB

VR is already being used outside the United States and in other sports as well. The DFB has now also entered into a cooperation with STRIVR, but here the focus is primarily on the youth sector.

In addition, this VR project is still in its infancy, as soccer is much more dynamic compared to free-throw training in basketball or the more static game situations in soccer. According to STRIVR CEO Derek Belch, however, the DFB is certainly willing to experiment.

[Decision-makers at the DFB] know the limitations of VR in terms of soccer versus American soccer. But they want to get [into VR] now, experiment, make mistakes and figure out the best use cases. They want to find ways to use VR to gain a competitive advantage.

For its part, the DFB sees opportunities in the area of perceiving game situations, for example, which can always be experienced in a new way thanks to VR. In this way, players can train to focus their attention on the essentials and thus make better decisions on the pitch later on.

VR for Olympians and fringe sports

But it also works without the ball. Some of the athletes who competed in a wide variety of disciplines at the 2018 Winter Olympics trained with the help of virtual reality. And even for marginal sports like lacrosse, there are now VR training applications. A father-son duo developed the Virtual Goalie application for Oculus Rift, which offers a wide range of functions.

In addition to individually configurable training scenarios for lacrosse goalkeepers, the app collects data during VR training that is later processed into feedback. This provides players with information about their posture or the areas of the goal where they are particularly susceptible to being hit by opponents.

How effective is VR training in professional sports?

Whether it's lacrosse, soccer, soccer or basketball, all these VR approaches sound sensible in theory at first, but the question inevitably arises: Does all this magic produce countable results? One thing can be said with certainty: VR is not per se the panacea for promising training. A look at England, or more precisely Arsenal FC, shows that the whole thing can backfire.

The soccer club invested 100,000 British pounds in a virtual reality training system from the Dutch company Beyond Sports, with which the DFB will also be working in the future. Apparently, however, this did not go down particularly well with some Arsenal professionals - several players complained of feeling unwell or even motion sickness.

On the other hand, there are also many success stories. The aforementioned free-throw "expert" Andre Drummond feels better when he has to go to the line thanks to VR training - and he hits more often. In the case of basketball player Ian Mahimi, who plays for the Washington Wizards and uses the same training method, there are even precise figures. These suggest that the VR training sessions are indeed the reason for his improved performance.

In football, too, success seems to prove teams that train with VR right. Moreover, players and coaches emphasize the added value that the additional virtual training minutes or "reps" (repetitions / repetitions) of game situations, bring for them.

Moreover, virtual reality is already being used in professional sports for more than just training purposes. Applications like Eye-Sync help to quickly assess potentially dangerous injuries in sports correctly and react accordingly. And that's at least as valuable as a few extra converted free throws.

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