Evaluating perspective switching and positional memory in football using an immersive head-mounted display system

Abstract

In football, transitioning from first-person to a bird’s-eye view and its relation to positional memory remains unclear. To investigate this, we developed and validated a system using immersive head-mounted displays (HMD) to assess football players’ abilities, thus potentially enhancing positional memory. We assessed experienced and inexperienced players in a virtual football setting with randomly placed players. We measured the time and perspective shifts required to reconstruct player positions from a bird’s-eye view. Further, both groups observed players in a virtual environment and then reconstructed their positions for accuracy. Compared to inexperienced players, experienced players showed higher precision in reconstructing the spatial arrangement of player objects, suggesting the feasibility of evaluating the transition from first-person to bird’s-eye view. The system enables us to assess ball control, memory of teammate and opponent positions, and recall of key player positions for future plays. This demonstrated the value of the immersive HMD system, which can quantitatively manipulate VR variables, in comprehensively understanding cognitive relationships. Expanding this system for evaluating player attributes and training football players holds great promise.