Dallas Cowboys Try To Score With Virtual Reality

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The Dallas Cowboys are the first NFL team to invest in virtual reality as a training aid. And, (sad to say as a Washington Redskins fan) they might be on to something. VR has the potential to be a serious training aid in sports, the military, law enforcement, and search-and-rescue, among other areas.

The Cowboys have teamed with StriVR Labs, a company co-founded by Derek Belch, a former college football player at Stanford University, and Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford University professor and renowned VR expert. Belch first developed the technology for the Stanford football team. Stanford and a few other college teams have used the tech, but the Cowboys are the first team to use it in the NFL.

The system allows players to use a virtual reality helmet to view video of live plays from practice as if they were on the field. A special camera is placed on the field that takes 360 degree video, which can then be used to look all around the field as if the player is really there. If the player turns his head with the VR helmet, it changes his view of the real play. This is especially important in football, as many of the "reads" -- the decisions that a quarterback makes about where to throw the ball or if to change a play -- happen before the play starts.

Coaches and players can then review whether the player is making the appropriate decisions and adjust the way the quarterback views the defense. Are you looking at the right things? Are you seeing where everyone is lined up against you? When the play starts, are you looking in the right places? The system works best for quarterbacks or the guys that traditionally act like the "quarterbacks of the defense," the middle linebackers and safeties

Here is a video of it in action (skip the first minute of intro if you want to get to the demo faster):

Compare that to the traditional way a team practices and reviews itself. Traditionally, NFL teams review film most often from the "all 22" camera angle, which shows all players on the field. Until a few years ago, this was done in a practice room only. The tablet has allowed coaches to bring film to the sidelines. But still, all the film is 2-D, and it is from either an endzone angle or a side-field angle. Here's an NFL Films production of what film study looks like:

As you see, none of that is from the frame of reference of the player. Mazyar Fallah, associate professor if kinesiology and health science at York University, who studies visual perception and attention, believes that changing the point of view could be a big advantage. "In viewing [game tape], you have to transform it to your position and viewpoint on the field," he said. "You encode the field of play as a visuomotor field. And you need to make reference frame transformations to do that … we have a well-developed parietal lobe that does tons of reference frame transformations."

In other words, when we look at 2-D film from an angle above the field, our brains mentally flip the camera to imagine it from the field point of view. That's slower than if we already had that camera view.

When you encounter something, like a play on a football field, your brain responds to it partially based on whether it has seen it before. We call that recognition primed decision (RPD) models. RPD 1 is when you've seen something before, and you know exactly what to do with it. That's why we practice. RPD 2 is when you don't feel like you've seen the situation before, but some of what you are seeing makes you think you have a solution. We sometimes call that "lateral thinking," in which we apply a solution to a decision that is "like" something we've seen before. RPD 3 is when you know the situation, but don't know what to do.

The fastest processing for your brain to handle is obviously RPD 1, because it quickly identifies what to do and how to do it. It doesn't have to run through a bunch of internal scenarios to figure out the answer. Practicing with VR "can shift a player's decision making from RPD model 3 and/or 2, to RPD model 1, which is the fastest, best result … and only builds from experience," said Fallah.

In easy to understand terms, Fallah said: "You see the play develop, and you start responding to it before you're really conscious of needing to make a decision."

This also provides extra practice for players lower on the depth chart. Practice time is limited for backups, so more time in the helmet is the next best thing to more time under one on the field.

[ VR can be extra fun and social, if Facebook has a say. Read Facebook VR: 10 Reasons It Won't Work Out. ]

One can easily transfer this concept to other fields. Imagine you are a police officer trying to get hostages out of a hostage situation. Would you rather have seen the map or the 3-D video of the actual building where the hostages are located? Any place where people are asked to convert a 2-D image into a 3-D experience can benefit under the right circumstances.

Unlike gaming, for which I consider VR a sweaty novelty at best, it is in such training applicaitons where VR will make a real dent. It's using augmented reality or repetitious reality that allows you to rehearse and practice your craft.