Virtual Ski Training System that Allows Beginners to Acquire Ski Skills Based on Physical and Visual Feedbacks

This paper proposes a ski training system using VR (Virtual Reality) that enables beginners to acquire skiing skills without going to an actual ski ground. The proposed system obtains the speed of skiing based on the center of pressure (COP) of each player's foot. The first-person perspective of skiing at the obtained speed down a ski slope is fed back to the player as a VR image. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system and the VR interface. Specifically, beginner skiers were categorized into three groups: “a group trained with the proposed VR system”, “a group trained with a system that provides feedback of the skiing speed calculated from the COP by increasing or decreasing the gauge (a bar-shaped graph representing changes in numerical values), instead of VR”, and “a group that does not train with the system”. After training under each of these conditions, a sliding test was conducted on an actual ski slope to check the degree of skill acquisition. The results show that subjects trained with the proposed system acquired more skiing skills than subjects who did not use the system on actual ski slopes. Furthermore, there was no clear difference in the result of the sliding test between subjects trained by the VR interface and those trained by the gauge interface, but the VR interface yields better deceleration postures.