The Potential Usefulness of Virtual Reality Systems for Athletes: A Short SWOT Analysis

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) systems (Neumann et al., 2017), which are currently receiving considerable attention from athletes, create a two- or three-dimensional environment in the form of emulated pictures and/or video-recordings where in addition to being mentally present, the athlete even often feels like he/she is there physically as well. As she/he interacts with and/or reacts to this environment, movement is captured by sensors, allowing the system to provide feedback.

As with every newly evolving technology related to human movement and behavior, it is important to be aware of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) associated with the use of this particular type of technology. SWOT analyses are widely utilized for strategic planning of developmental processes (Pickton and Wright, 1998; Tao and Shi, 2016) and it is of great interest to consider whether VR systems should be adopted by athletes or not. Aspects more inherent to the employed technologies of VR systems, and aspects more related to the application of VR systems with athletes are considered as strength/weaknesses and opportunities/threats, respectively. Analogously, SWOT analysis concerning another emerging technology involving sensors of individual parameters (i.e., “implantables”) has been performed (Sperlich et al., 2017).