Feasibility Study on Using AI and VR for Decision-Making Training of Basketball Players

Abstract

Decision-making plays an essential role in basketball offense. Offensive players must make effective decisions to score a basket in various defensive situations. Virtual reality (VR) has been widely used in the training of athletes to strengthen their ability to make optimal decisions by creating controllable repeatable training scenarios. In this article, an action-aware offensive decision-making training system for basketball using VR and artificial intelligence is proposed. The proposed system is composed of different virtual defensive scenarios and an offensive action recognition framework. Trainees wearing head-mounted display and a motion capture suit are trained by intuitively interacting with the VR system and receive decision suggestions when a bad one is made. This study changes the training media and methods to create an immersive training environment during the training phase and evaluates the training effectiveness. These training scenarios are a conventional tactics board, the proposed VR system with a prerecorded <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$360^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> panorama video, and the VR system with computer-simulated virtual content. Results indicate that the training scenario affects the training in terms of decision time.