A Study on VR Training of Baseball Athletes

As virtual reality (VR) technologies continue to mature and with VR headsets becoming widely available on the consumer market, more people are using VR for gaming, entertainment and skill training. It is inevitable that VR simulations have permeated sports training as a tool to enhance athletic performance. The present study is part of an ongoing program at Purdue University where short VR modules are routinely used by the coaching and sports medicine staff to train baseball players. For the present study, three VR simulations were developed to train a player's ability to recognize ball colors, type of ball trajectories, and strike vs. ball. Twenty-four baseball players took part in the study where half served as the control group and the other half received 12 sessions of VR training. The participants also completed two tasks before and after the main experiment. Although no significant difference was found between the pre- and post-tests, the participants did respond positively to a survey and found the VR training fun and useful for training their eyes. Future work will continue to assess the efficacy of VR training with Purdue baseball team players.