Pilot study on the spatial and temporal accuracies of hitting a high-speed virtual ball in tennis simulation

Abstract

We conducted a pilot study to determine if users can accurately perceive the spatial position of a virtual ball traveling at high speed, track and hit it at the correct time with a real racket in a stereoscopic immersive tennis training system. To ensure that the tennis ball appears spatially accurate from the player's view point when projected onto the display walls, the positions of both eyes are obtained using head tracking. The tracker to display latency was determined to be 40 milliseconds. The pilot study with proficient players shows that they are able to accurately intersect the trajectory of the virtual ball with their racket, with an average error of less than 0.1m. This initial finding will be useful for immersive virtual reality applications involving high speed tasks.