Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 155, October 2020, 103923
Computers & Education

Augmented reality tools for sports education and training

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103923Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Various visual, auditory, and haptic information and feedback could be implemented in AR.

  • New rules could be implemented in AR scenarios to reduce the gaps between different players.

  • Issues related to tracking, display, latency, as well as content, ergonomics, and design issues should be addressed.

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) provides additional information to the reality of sportspeople, and might offer supplementary advantages compared to other technologies. The goals of this study were to characterize and understand the benefits of AR in sports education and training. We reviewed Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science, and SportDiscus databases, and discussed the results according to their role in sport (practitioner, spectator, and customer). Our results showed that different AR approaches might be used for learning and providing feedback. New rules could be introduced for reducing the gap between players with different experience levels. Additional information could also be added to improve the audience experience. We also explored the limitations of current AR systems and their efficacy in training, and provided suggestions for designing training scenarios.

Introduction

Physical educators may use technology to add more value to their teaching, and to improve athletes' capabilities. Computers play growing roles in simulating the dynamics of sports in gaming environments. Wearable sensors have also received interest over the past years due to their promise for monitoring the users' health, fitness, and their surroundings. Additionally, virtual environments provide opportunities for practicing sports in remote places (Sánchez Pato & Davis Remilllard, 2018), and might allow transferring behaviors to real situations. Augmented reality (AR) comprises a view of the real-world merged with computer-generated elements such as audio, video, graphics, or location data (Milgram, Takemura, Utsumi, & Kishino, 1995; Sourin, 2017). While virtual reality (VR) replaces the real-world with computer-generated elements, AR works in tandem with the physical world for enhancing users’ perception of the surrounding environment (Wiederhold, 2019).

The ideology behind AR is to expand the organizational space for enhancing the environment and situations, and to offer perceptually rich experiences (Sánchez Pato & Davis Remilllard, 2018). With the help of AR, the surrounding world becomes interactive and digitally manipulatable. Additionally, by improving users’ capabilities to detect, recognize, and process objects and situations, AR allows adding, removing, or changing aspects of the real-world more efficiently. AR technologies are also used in media, office productivity, phobia treatments, pedagogy, and human-robot interaction (Brito & Stoyanova, 2018). Overall, AR is more than just visuals and is about augmenting our world with digital assets.

Before 2010, most AR applications were complex and expensive systems that restricted their accessibility and adoption. In recent years, the integration of AR systems into mobile devices increased the number of AR applications. For example, while mobile games might contribute to increased sedentary times, location-based AR games might encourage players to be active and to interact with other players (Finco, Rocha, Fão, & Santos, 2017). Few sports coaches have experience with AR technologies to recognize their benefits and applications in their practice. Therefore, the goal of this study was to provide an overview of AR applications in sports education and training. Specifically, we wanted to answer the following questions: (1) What are the characteristics of available AR systems? and (2) what are the benefits of using AR compared to other applications?

Section snippets

Search strategy and selection criteria

Although AR and sports concepts might look clear at first, their definitions are strongly debated.

Azuma (1997) mentioned that “… with AR, 3D virtual objects are integrated into a 3D real environment in real-time.” This definition appears to be restrictive and the following examples can militate in this direction. Regarding “3D virtual objects,” although some see-through glasses are usually considered as AR displays, they either display 2D objects, without any perspective, or they display

Results

Fig. 1 unfolds our experimental method. The search strategy initially yielded a total of 995 articles. A careful review of all the abstracts resulted in 52 pertinent articles selected for this review. Of these 52 articles, there were 14 journal articles, 34 conference articles, and 4 book chapters. We also introduced sub-categories according to each research question. These categories helped us to group studies based on their shared characteristics.

Fig. 2 shows that the AR systems mainly target

Summary

Because of limitations of current video-based and VR systems, AR could offer alternative scenarios for sports education and training. This includes visual, auditory, and haptic feedback for learning and exploring abstract concepts. It may not be necessary to include all elements of real sports inside the system, and players can still benefit from the gaming scenarios, only by observing. Providing additional information, especially to novice players, may improve their experience. It may also

Conclusions

In this article, we reviewed conceptual and empirical studies on using AR for sports education and training. We proposed different systems for receiving, processing, and displaying the information. We showed the possibility of AR systems for learning sports skills, providing additional information and feedback, stimulating practice, introducing new rules, and creating new sports.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Pooya Soltani: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing - review & editing. Antoine H.P. Morice: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The funders were not involved in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of data, writing of the report, and in the decision to submit the article for publication. Authors declare no competing interests.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a grant (Cybershoot project, 2017) overseen by the Carnot Institute called "STAR", as part of the national french Carnot program. The first author also received funding from Collège de France (PAUSE program).

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