What Can VR Systems Tell Sports Players? Reaction-Based Analysis of Baseball Batters in Virtual and Real Worlds

This study aims at ascertaining the applicability of a virtual reality environment (VRE) to sports training. Hitting an incoming object is one of the most common actions in various ball games, in which players are required to move to a suitable position and hit the object in a split second; this is a complicated task requiring spatio-temporal reaction to the object. Due to this complexity, how a VRE can serve as a training environment still remains an open question. In the work reported in this paper, we investigated the idea of substituting a VRE for an actual environment for training on the task of hitting a baseball. By focusing on the batter's temporal behavior with real and virtual environments, we clarified factors that contribute to the batter's reaction. This helped us understand how training VREs can be effectively utilized and the VRE requirements needed for sports training.