SPinPong - Virtual Reality Table Tennis Skill Acquisition using Visual, Haptic and Temporal Cues

Learning an advanced skill in sports requires a huge amount of practice and players also have to overcome both physical difficulties and the dullness of repetitive training. Returning a fast spin shot in table tennis could be taken as an example, as athletes need to judge the spin type and decide the racket pose within a second, which is difficult for beginners. Therefore, in this paper, we show how to design an intuitive training system to acquire this specific skill using different cues in Virtual Reality (VR). Using VR, we can easily provide visual information, attach haptic devices, and distort the speed of time, however, it is difficult to decide which types of information could benefit the training. In an initial study, by comparing real world training with VR training, we showed the effect of VR training and obtained some insights about augmentation for training spin shots. The training system was then improved by adding three new conditions using different visualizations and temporal distortions, as well as a haptic racket for creating realistic feedback. Finally, we performed a detailed experiment, which suggest a significant improvement of skill for each condition compared to the baseline, while a qualitative evaluation indicates that both users' motivation and their understanding of spin are increased by using our system.

在体育运动中学习一项高级技能需要大量的练习，运动员还必须克服身体上的困难以及重复训练的枯燥。以回击乒乓球的快速旋转球为例，运动员需要在一秒内判断旋转类型并决定球拍姿势，这对初学者来说是困难的。因此，在本文中，我们展示了如何设计一个直观的训练系统，利用虚拟现实（VR）中的不同提示来获得这一特定技能。利用VR，我们可以轻松地提供视觉信息、连接触觉设备以及扭曲时间速度，然而，很难确定哪些类型的信息对训练有益。在一项初步研究中，通过比较现实世界训练和VR训练，我们展示了VR训练的效果，并获得了一些关于旋转球训练增强的见解。然后，通过添加三种使用不同可视化和时间扭曲的新条件以及一个用于创建逼真反馈的触觉球拍，对训练系统进行了改进。最后，我们进行了一项详细的实验，结果表明与基线相比，每种条件下技能都有显著提高，而定性评估表明，使用我们的系统提高了用户的积极性以及他们对旋转的理解。