Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and improve it for high-level athletes but also to better train people and encourage
them to practice more.
Sport is characterized by complex displacements and movements. These move-
ments are dependent on visual information that the athlete gathers from his envi-
ronment, including the opponent's actions. Perception is thus fundamental to the
performance. Indeed, a sportive action, unique, complex and often limited in time,
requires a selective gathering of information. While everyone is able to perform sim-
ple tasks, everyone cannot be top athlete and return service tennis reaching nearly
200 km/h, stop handball throw or prevent a rugby attacker to pass with a deceptive
movement. For many sports, performance is dependent on the ability to correctly
react under time pressure; everything being often played in a few milliseconds, it is
important to be at the right place at the right time.
If we all access to the same information during the action, why do not we all react
in the same way? The reason is probably that time constraint requires a selection
of perceptual information, that is to say eliciting some information to get right to
the point. This perception, often seen as a prerogative for action, takes the role of a
passive collector of information. However, the perception-action relationship should
not be considered uniquely but rather as a coupling: we perceive to act but we must
act to perceive [
27
]. There would thus be laws of coupling between the informational
variables available in the environment and the motor responses of a subject.
In sport, this framework has already inspired FarrowandAbernethywho preserved
the perception-action coupling as close to the real situation as possible during a
video-based experiment [
24
]. In this work, the authors tried to reproduce a realistic
viewpoint by capturing video sequence from within the field of basketball. The
authors tested two conditions: a coupled (perception and action) and uncoupled one.
The results attest that participants were better in prediction accuracy when perception
and action were coupled and when the ball flight was available. In other words, it is
necessary that top athletes can act to better perceive the opportunities of action from
the environment. Whichever school of thought considered, Virtual Reality offers
new, more pertinent and more accurate perspectives to address these concepts.
13.1.1 Why Virtual Reality for Sports?
In sport, top athletes develop important skills and perceptual motor coordination
adapted to the situation. As a consequence, many studies have focused on the analysis
of perceptual information of athletes [
61
]. For example, in sports duel, it was shown
that experts have better skills than novices in using visual information to guide their
early response [
6
,
58
]. However the analysis of duels is relatively complex. Indeed,
the player's movement is modulated by his opponent's one. Understanding how and
on which criteria players adjust their movements requires the development of specific
methodologies. To better understandwhyVirtual Reality can be used for such studies,
it is important to describe the limitations of previous approaches used to investigate
sports performance, and to understand why it can overcome them.
