Virtual reality set to revolutionise sports
VIRTUAL reality smells like sweat. Or at least it did to me in the brief period I spent in that altered state, during which time I practised sideline out of bounds plays with Washington Wizards rookies, shot some free throws with Ian Mahimni, and then wound up in Verizon Centre tunnel huddling and holding hands with the entire squad just before the tip.
The Oculus Rift headset provided by the Wizards training staff didn’t look like a universe destroyer. It looked rather like something a welder would wear, and weighed about as much as a child’s toy, only it was loaded with proprietary Virtual Reality tape from Wizards workouts.
What no one can prepare you for is the extent to which the device alters space, literally rearranges the ceiling and walls around you, and persuades all of your senses.
VR is still in its clumsy, crude, awkward, unsharpened infancy - it’s not even close to where it’s going to be. Yet it’s already startlingly clear that the technology is going to change the sports experience for everyone, from player to spectator.
“It’s an inevitability, if you will,” said Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, who has made a big investment in the technology.
You draft players in the NBA where the kid goes to college for one year and then you put him on your team, and in the old days you’d give him a looseleaf book with words and scribbles. It looked like geometry homework. — Ted Leonsis, owner of Washington Wizards
Leonsis has been ahead of most franchise owners in importing VR for his teams - he has implemented it for the Wizards, Capitals and Mystics equally - because of his belief that it’s going to affect everything from competitive edge to player development to spectator experience. The conviction is grounded in his experience at AOL.
The people most interested in VR are no longer gamers. They are campus lab researchers looking at ways to apply VR to everything from surgical training to bridge building. Which is how the Wizards came by their specific system, which is called STRIVR: It originated in the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, where Wizards team president Ernie Grunfeld’s son Danny was in school.
Danny knew a Stanford football team kicker and graduate assistant named Derek Belch who studied in the lab. Belch and his professor-mentor Jeremy Bailenson founded STRIVR to explore a host of new applications of “immersive performance training,” using Stanford’s football team as their guinea pigs. Danny Grunfeld brought STRIVR to his father and Leonsis, who promptly implemented it.
Research shows that generally, people retain about 10 per cent of what they read, but can remember more than 40 per cent of what they watch and listen to. VR proponents have taken that concept and sprinted with it in the sports realm.
They have demonstrated that when it comes to any action that involves body coordination, full immersion learning is measurably better. Belch’s mentor Bailenson, did a study in which he compared learning Tai Chi in immersive VR to a traditional two-dimensional instructional video. Those who learned from VR performed better in every single phase of the experiment. According to STRIVR, teams can improve “recollection of key concepts by 30 per cent.”
To franchise owners and general managers worried about developing expensive young draft picks, “That’s very powerful,” Leonsis said. It struck Leonsis that teams were handling their young players such as Kelly Oubre, tech savvy and living his life on the Internet playing egames, all wrong.
“You draft players in the NBA where the kid goes to college for one year and then you put him on your team, and in the old days you’d give him a loose-leaf book with words and scribbles,” Leonsis said. “It looked like geometry homework. And you’d say ‘Well, you’re a rookie and we’ve already got starters and backups and you’re not going to participate very much, you’ll do a little in practice.’ And then we expect these players to get it. And why would we expect that when we’re not even teaching them the right way?” — Washington Post