Visual perception in virtual reality and the application in sports

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has become an interesting tool in many research fields, and benefits have already emerged. Thus, in recent years VR is also being used in sport science and sports practice. With this, controversial results and often existing preliminary study designs make it hard to explain why differences in user’s actions still occur within VR compared to real-world (RW) conditions. One of the reasons might be the artificial presentation of the virtual environment leading to differences since VR does not fully measure up with natural conditions. Hereby, the most stimulated sense within VR is the visual one, although others can be stimulated. Accordingly, the question is whether differences in user’s visual perception occur within virtual environments and how this may affect the users’ actions. Therefore, more research should be done to address this problem and narrow down the influencing factors. In the current work, basic skills in VR are compared with those from RW to recognize more specific differences and recommend how VR can be used nowadays within the sports sector, also enabling transferable performances. Hereby, the focus is predominantly comparing the visual perception between the conditions (RW and VR). The comparisons relate to 1) the measurement quality of gaze behavior on static and dynamic visual stimuli, 2) the spatial orientation including distance estimations, route recreation, and actively walking tasks and 3) the completion of motoric tasks (balancing, grasping, and throwing) accompanied with different body visualization types to examine which body parts need to be visualized during the VR experience to fulfill adequate performances. Summarized, there occur marginally differences within the parameter collected in both conditions. For the gaze behavior, less precision is provided of the integrated Eye-Tracking system in the head-mounted display. Furthermore, the participants could not observe the dynamic stimuli in VR as accurately as in RW (p<.05). Within the spatial orientation, only in route recreation has been found an impact in VR, however, the actual task demand was equally fulfilled. Examining the body visualization, the worst performance occurred when no body was visualized during task completion. However, the remaining body visualization types did not significantly impact participants’ performance, so whole-body visualization is not essential for completing motor tasks in VR. Overall, the participants’ performances are comparable to those from RW. Although slight differences have been shown in VR in terms of longer movement execution time and increased subjective estimation of tasks’ difficulties during the motoric tasks, there are no limitations affecting participants’ performances within basic skills. Further investigations could reveal whether VR can already serve as an additional or alternative training tool in sports.