Virtual Environment for Rugby Skills (2010-2014) | Professor Nigel W. John

Professor Nigel W. John FEG FLSW

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Virtual Environment for Rugby Skills (2010-2014)



There is growing interest in utilising Virtual Environments (VEs) in the context of sports (Miles, Pop, Watt, Lawrence, & John, 2012). In particular there is a desire to be able to improve sensorimotor skills rather than just using a VE as a tool for strategy analysis or entertainment. The skills required across all different sports are very large and varied.

Miles, H.C. (2014). An Advanced Virtual Environment for Rugby Skills Training. PhD Thesis, Bangor University. This project was carried out by my PhD student, Helen Miles, and focussed on developing a VE for training skills in rugby. Such a VE needs to provide realistic rendering of the sports scene to achieve good perceptual fidelity. More important for a sport-themed VE is high functional fidelity, which requires an accurate physics model of a complex environment, real time response, and a natural user interface. The goal is to provide multiple scenarios to the player at different levels of difficulties, providing them with improved skills that can be applied directly to the real sports arena.

Helen is currently a Research Associate at Aberystwyth University.

Further Reading

  1. Miles, H. C., Pop, S. R., Watt, S. J., Lawrence, G. P., & John, N. W. (2012). A review of virtual environments for training in ball sports. Computers & Graphics, 36(6), 714–726.