THE EFFECT OF TABLE TENNIS STROKE TRAINING WITH VIRTUAL REALITY ON HITTING ACCURACY

T. Nagao¹, N. Maeda¹, M. Komiya¹, S. Tsutsumi¹, K. Tsuchida¹, Y. Tamura¹, Y. Shigekuni¹, Y. Urabe¹

¹Hiroshima University, Department of Sports Rehabilitation, Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Hiroshima, Japan

Background: Virtual reality (VR) has been applied to improve performance in sports activities (Gray, 2017; Faure, 2020). In table tennis, the quantitative performance such as the hitting accuracy is improved in hitting training with VR (Michalski et al., 2019). Stroke training without ball conducts in real-world (Shinada, 2004), and we expected that the effectiveness of VR is demonstrated by comparing with stroke training using VR. However most of the previous studies compared a group with no training. Thus, whether training combined with VR in table tennis stroke contributes to performance improvement when compared to real-world training is unclear.

Purpose: This study aimed to clarify the effect of practicing strokes while viewing table tennis hitting motion video in VR on hitting accuracy.

Methods: 14 male and female participants with no experience in table tennis (20.8 ± 0.8 years) were randomly divided into a control and a VR group. The control practiced 100 strokes without balls, and the VR, while wearing a head-mounted display and watching the table tennis hitting video shot by a 360° camera. As a quantitative performance test, we calculated the hitting accuracy. We measured the number of balls hit within the square plots of 30 cm per side in the corner out of 100 balls (the hitting accuracy) before and after the training (Cao et al., 2020). In addition, we measured the immersion score of the training in VR using a Visual Analog Scale.
Outcomes were statistically analyzed using a paired t-test for the comparison of the hitting accuracy before and after the training. T-test for the comparison of the improvement rate in the hitting accuracy between groups. The relationship between the improvement rate and the sense of immersion was examined using Pearson's correlation analysis. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05.

Results: For the hitting accuracy, the control and VR have marked significant improvements after the training (before in the control: 23.7 ± 9.7 balls, after: 30.7 ± 12.2, p < 0.05; before in the VR: 17.0 ± 7.1, after: 28.6 ± 4.5, p < 0.05) and the improvement rate in the VR showed a significant enhancement compared to the control (the control: 133.3 ± 39.2%, the VR: 190.8 ± 67.0%, p < 0.05). The immersion score was 74.6 ±5.8 points. There was a positive correlation trend between the hitting accuracy and the immersion score (r = 0.70, p = 0.08).

Conclusions: To visualize the body in motion within the video in VR is important to improve quantitative performance in sports (Pastel et al., 2020). The VR was able to recognize the body as a model of the stroke motion through the 360° camera video and gained a sense of immersion as if they were hitting balls. Therefore, we consider that stroke training using VR improves quantitative performance compared to real-world stroke training in terms of hitting accuracy.

Implications: Table tennis stroke training using VR can effectively improve hitting accuracy.

Funding acknowledgements: We have no funding acknowledgement in this study.

Keywords:
virtual reality
table tennis performance
the sense of immersion

Topics:
Sport & sports injuries
Professional practice: other
Innovative technology: information management, big data and artificial intelligence

Did this work require ethics approval? Yes

Institution: Hiroshima University

Committee: the Ethical Committee for Epidemiology of Hiroshima University

Ethics number: E2022-0066