Real Handball Goalkeeper vs. Virtual Handball Thrower

Abstract

R eal Hand b all Go alk eep er v s. Virt u al Hand b all Throw er A b st r a ctVirtual reality offers new tools for human motion understanding. Several applications have been widely used in teleoperation, military training, driving and ying simulators, and so forth. We propose to test if virtual reality is a valid training tool for the game of handball. We focused on the duel between a handball goalkeeper and a thrower. To this end, we de ned a pilot experiment divided into two steps: an experiment with real subjects and another one with virtual throwers. The throwers' motions were captured in order to animate their avatar in a reality center. In this paper, we focused on the evaluation of presence when a goalkeeper is confronting these avatars. To this end, we compared the goalkeeper's gestures in the real and in the virtual experiment to determine if virtual reality engendered the same movements for the same throw. Our results show that gestures did not differ between the real and virtual environment. As a consequence, we can say that the virtual environment offered enough realism to initiate natural gestures. Moreover, as in real games, we observed the goalkeeper's anticipation to allow us to use virtual reality in future work as a way to understand the goalkeeper and thrower interactions. The main originality of this work was to measure presence in a sporting application with new evaluation methods based on motion capture.

Anticipatory Judgment of Tennis Serve: A Comparison between Video Images and Computer Graphics Animations

“…The CG animations offer, at least partly, the possibility that they can be used for evaluating perceptual skills in tennis. Bideau et al (2003;2004) examined handball goalkeepers' responses when faced with an opponent's throw in a VR environment as compared to a real situation. The study demonstrated that the VR situation was realistic enough that it made it possible for researchers to evaluate the goalkeeper's natural reactions.…”

“…While the point-light displays are a potentially valuable tool to permit the manipulation of display kinematics, the computeranimated characters also have significant potential for the simulated presentation of sport situations because they allow exact changes to be made in various parameters, such as the movement, body, characteristics, contour, texture, and perspective of the image. In recent times, with the development of computer graphics (CG) technology, several sports science studies have begun to use humanlike CG animations as a visual stimulus that plays handball (Bideau et al, 2003;2004), runs (Hodgins et al, 1998), and plays tennis (Fukuhara et al, 2005;Pollick et al, 2001). The advantage of using CG animations is that they can precisely control kinematic features and also provide information about appearance (e.g., contour, texture, and size).…”

“…To examine perceptual skills in sports using CG animations, it will be necessary to identify the nature of perceptual information within CG animations. To date, although some researchers have employed CG animations in sport tasks (e.g., Bideau et al, 2003;2004;Hodgins et al, 1998;Pollick et al, The aim of this study was to explore how CG animations of tennis serves affected the perceptual skills of skilled players. The participants attempted to anticipate the serve directions from either the video images or CG animations.…”

PREVISE - A Human-Scale Virtual Environment with Haptic Feedback

“…Such experimental paradigm has been used in many studies (Bideau, 2003 ;Zaal, 2003 ;Richard, 1994). However, a few of these involve haptic feedback (Richard, 1998 ;Jeong, 2004).…”

The Effect on Lower Spine Muscle Activation of Walking on a Narrow Beam in Virtual Reality

“…Both skin conductance, heart rate and heart rate variability have been shown to respond significantly in the context of general social situations [16], and social situations that are highly stressful [17]. It has also been found that there are similarities in behavior when participants play handball in virtual reality compared to physical reality [18]. In some of these examples anxiety, as measured through physiological responses, is one sign that people are responding to the virtual events as if they were really happening.…”