There is growing interest in utilising virtual environments (VEs) in the
context of sports. In particular there is a desire to be able to improve sen-
sorimotor skills rather than just using a VE as a tool for strategy analysis,
or entertainment. While there have been a number of VEs developed for
the sports of tennis, football and baseball, very little work has been done
for the game of rugby. The main aim of this thesis is to address this gap in
the research. Passing is chosen as the skill in question, as it is considered
a core, fundamental skill of the game that is sometimes forgotten amongst
more complex training regimes. No previous work has been undertaken
to build a virtual environment to train passing skills for rugby, and so a
prototype system has been designed to explore it’s potential.
The system (VERST: a Virtual Environment for Rugby Skills Train-
ing) was designed to have a user facing a large screen with a virtual scene
containing targets; the user holds a real rugby ball (tethered to prevent
damage to equipment) and must throw it at the virtual targets.The system was tested in two exploratory experiments featuring a throw-
ing task and a verbal estimation task. 10 participants were recruited to as-
sess the perception of depth for the virtual targets and the suitability of the
design of the system. Different configurations of the hardware were tested:
the participant’s position relative to the screen, the use of stereoscopy and
the use of a floor screen. The results suggests that the difference in in-
tended target distances is being correctly perceived, but that the subjects
were not throwing that distance. Though the reason for this is not clear, it
is possible that the virtual scene chosen for the task lacked sufficient depth
cues. It is also possible that the task was not appropriately designed, as
the task of throwing the ball forward is an illegal move in a game of rugby.
Despite negative results from the throwing task, VERST has proven to be
a useful platform for investigating the optimal set up of a virtual environ-
ment for training ball passing skills in rugby