A Virtual Environment for Rugby Skills Training

The Virtual Environment Rugby Skills Trainer (VERST) is an on-going collaborative project between Bangor University’s Schools of Computer Science, Sports Health and Education Sciences and Psychology, together with Rugby Innovations Ltd., to create an accessible training tool that will help professional rugby players improve certain skills. It is said that it takes 10,000 hours of learning to fully grasp a skill; VERST will reduce the waiting time during practices and allow players to train individually. Although similar projects are being developed for lineouts and defensive strategy, as a first step in our implementation we have chosen to focus on passing the ball; an accurate passing technique is more difficult to achieve than many realize, and is a truly vital base skill. Using a motion capture suite and other tracking hardware, the players’ and ball's movements are digitized so to allow them to interact with the virtual environment in a natural way. Physical modelling and simulating the motion of a virtual ball under real-game conditions preserve the accuracy of the environment. Wales is characterized as a nation that loves rugby, but no one really uses this for marketing – a project from the heartland might be what Wales needs to win the world cup!