Learning to juggle in an interactive virtual reality environment

Abstract

Virtual reality environments are great tools for training as they are very cheap compared to on-site training for many tasks. While the focus has mostly been on the visual experience, we present a system that combines real world interactions with the virtual visual world to train motor skills that are applicable to the real world. Body pose tracking is combined with an Oculus Rift to create such an interactive virtual environment. As an example application, we taught users to juggle using a virtual training course. A third of the users were able to immediately transfer the newly acquired skills and juggle with real balls.