System Design and Feasibility Study on Immersive Basketball Vision Training

Vision Training is important for basketball players to effectively search for teammates who have wide-open opportunities to shoot, observe the defenders around the wide-open teammates and quickly choose a proper way to pass the ball to the most suitable one. We develop an immersive virtual reality (VR) system called VisCoach to simulate the player’s viewing perspective and generate three designed systematic vision training tasks to benefit the cultivating procedure. By recording the player’s eye gazing and dribbling video sequence, the proposed system can analyze the vision-related behavior to understand the training effectiveness. To demonstrate the proposed VR training system can facilitate the cultivation of vision ability, we recruited 14 experienced players to participate in a 6-week between-subject study and conducted a study by comparing the most frequently used 2D vision training method called Vision Performance Enhancement (VPE) program with the proposed system. Qualitative experiences and quantitative training results are reported to show that the proposed immersive VR training system can effectively improve player’s vision ability in terms of gaze behavior and dribbling stability. Furthermore, training in the VR-VisCoach Condition can transfer the learned abilities to real scenarios more easily than training in the 2D-VPE Condition.