Paris 2024: virtual reality for Olympic preparation
“France has an international leadership position for the use of virtual reality in sport.” Franck Multon, research director at the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria), says it without emphasis. For more than twenty years, professionals in sports sciences and virtual reality have combined their skills within the Rennes branch of the institute. Will this marginal advantage allow the French to win more medals this summer in Paris?
At theNational Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (Insep), temple of French champions, boxers already benefit from their work. Virtual reality headset on his head, one of them continues punches in the void. Immersed in his fight, facing a virtual but realistic opponent, he ends the session exhausted, with a smile on his lips. Mamadou Bakary Diabira, assistant English boxing coach at the French center of Insep, claims to experience this situation every time he suggests that a new boxer try virtual reality.
“It’s not the miracle solution, but it improves the performance of our athletes. They take these virtual sessions like real work,” he assures, also emphasizing the opportunity to offer training in opposition to an injured athlete, but without blows. “It is a complementary tool in the coaches’ arsenal. Virtual reality remains a tiny part of their training methods,” underlines Richard Kulpa, coordinator of the Revea project, which aims to optimize sports performance using virtual reality.
In addition to the Inria Rennes team, which is leading the project, academics from Marseille and Reims are working on the subject, making a total of around twenty people. Revea is one of the 11 projects funded, to the tune of 4.3 million euros, by the priority high-performance sports research program, launched in 2020 and allocated a total of 20 million euros by the State.
Three Olympic disciplines – boxing, athletics and gymnastics – benefit from this expertise. The boxing and athletics federations have requested the ability to work virtually on defense and decision-making on the handover. Objective: find an alternative to real training, a source of injuries.
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