A Fully Immersive Virtual Reality Cycling Training (vProCycle) and its Findings

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) technology is popularly applied in various sports training such as cycling, rowing, soccer, tennis and many more. In VR cycling, however, cyclists are not able to fully immerse themselves during the training due to the hardware and applications limitations required in the setup. In order to be fully immersed during the training, cyclists need to have similar effects to an outdoor training where they will experience cycling resistance, temperature effect, altitude, visual, and audio. For this reason, dedicated stimulus effectors or hardware are required to create these expected effects. On cycling resistance, a realistic cycling experience can be simulated by using a special device that simulates a resistance to the back wheel when cycling uphill in the VR simulation. In addition, the back wheel resistance would need to match the view displayed while paddling on an elevation slope. For higher immersion purposes, and the effect of temperature must be created that matches with the view visible in the display. For example, while the cyclist is on top of a virtual mountain, the cyclist would want to feel the effects of high altitude and low temperature. These stimulus effectors affect the realism experience while cycling in the VR simulation training. In the authors' previous papers, the setup using a combination of stimulus effectors including uphill elevation climb, altitude, temperature, interaction, visual, and audio were integrated into a product called vProCycle. The study tested on vProcycle was conducted with an assumption that virtual reality can enhance the experience of physical cycling training. The objective of this study is to determine whether or not vProCycle may improve cyclists' performance. This paper will discuss in detail the findings from data gathered during the experiment using vProCycle. More specifically, the findings are focused on the speed and the heart rate beats per minute which determine their performance improvement.