Abstract
Although there are many virtual reality (VR) applications in sports, only a handful of studies visualized the whole body. There is still a lack of understanding, how much of the own body must be visualized in the head-mounted display (HMD) based VR, to ensure fidelity and similar performance outcome as in the real-world. In the current study, 20 young and healthy participants completed three tasks in a real and virtual environment: balance task, grasping task, and throwing task with a ball. The aim was to find out the meaning of the visualization of different body parts for the quality of movement execution and to derive future guidelines for virtual body presentation. In addition, a comparison of human performance between reality and VR, with whole-body visualization was made. Focusing on the main goal of the current study, there were differences within the measured parameters due to the visualization of different body parts. In the balance task, the differences within the VR body visualization consisted mainly through no-body visualization (NB) compared to the other visualization types defined as whole-body (WB), WB except feet (NF), as well as WB except feet and legs (NLF). In the grasping task, the different body visualization seemed to have no impact on the participants’ performances. In the throwing task, the whole-body visualization led to higher accuracy compared to the other visualization types. Regarding the comparison between the conditions, we found significant differences between reality and VR, which had a large effect on the parameters time for completion in the balance and grasping task, the number of foot strikes on the beam in the balance task, as well as the subjective estimation of the difficulty for all tasks. However, the number of errors and the quality of the performances did not differ significantly. The current study was the first study comparing sports-related tasks in VR and reality with further manipulations (occlusions of body parts) of the virtual body. For studies analyzing perception and sports performance or for VR sports interventions, we recommend the visualization of the whole body in real-time.
Highlights
There are many different applications of a head-mounted display (HMD) based virtual reality (VR), but only a few studies integrated a virtual body in the context of sports applications
For the comparison between the conditions, we considered the whole-body visualization (WB) in condition VR
The participants performed significantly better in reality compared to VR (WB)
Summary
There are many different applications of a head-mounted display (HMD) based virtual reality (VR), but only a few studies integrated a virtual body in the context of sports applications Effects of body visualization in virtual reality review see [1]). VR is a promising tool for expanding the possibilities of psychological and sport training applications due to many aspects in the virtual environment that can be controlled and manipulated, which are not possible in a real-world setting [2]. Skills learned in adequate VR training with proper stimuli can be transferred to a real-world setting (for review see [5]). Previous studies in the field of psychology have shown that a virtual body can increase the feeling of presence and the degree of reality Previous studies in the field of psychology have shown that a virtual body can increase the feeling of presence and the degree of reality (e.g. [6]), especially when participants are allowed to choose a favorite design [7], and when the virtual body is realistic [8]
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