Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) is an often-used instrument in sports science research and practical training. However, VR studies with experienced athletes and sports specific tasks are rare. Furthermore, the transfer from interventions in VR into reality is even less investigated. It is possible to analyze benefits of VR using in-situ studies comparing human behavior in VR with reality. If no differences occur in the human behavior, then VR would be appropriate for interventions to improve athletes’ performance. Therefore, we let seven karate athletes respond each to ten attacks of a real attacker (reality) and a virtual attacker (VR using a Head Mounted Display) and compared the parameters “response quality” and “attack recognition” under both conditions. As attacks we chose Gyaku-Zuki (reverse punch, GZ) and Kizami-Zuki (attack with the front arm, KZ). ANOVAs and sign tests showed isolated cases of significant differences between both conditions: response quality in KZ, and attack recognition for 150ms in GZ, all p0.05). The remaining comparisons showed no significant differences (p>0.05). We conclude that further research is needed but the results of the present pilot study are promising to assume that VR is suitable for applications because similar performance outcome in reality and VR were obtained.
Highlights
For 20 years, virtual reality (VR) has been an often-used instrument in sports science research to analyze perception, decision-making, anticipation, and motor behavior [1], as well as in sport training [2,3,4]
We found significant differences between reality and VR in response quality and attack recognition, the effect sizes were only small
All participants achieved a little better performance in reality compared to VR, what can be explained by the familiarity
Summary
For 20 years, virtual reality (VR) has been an often-used instrument in sports science research to analyze perception, decision-making, anticipation, and motor behavior [1], as well as in sport training [2,3,4]. Burns and coworkers (2011) compared teaching three karate attacks in three conditions: with a real coach, a video and a virtual coach [16] They could not find any differences in skill acquisition in novices and concluded that VR is as suitable as other methods for motor learning. Studies that compare human behavior, and especially sports specific behavior of advanced and expert athletes between reality and virtual reality, are still rare Such studies would be very useful to analyze if humans act as natural as in VR as they do in reality. We compare the sports specific response behavior of experienced karate kumite athletes by analyzing their response quality and their perception of attacks (attack recognition) in VR and in reality
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