Assessing Personality Traits of Team Athletes in Virtual Reality
Markus Wirth, Stefan Gradl, Wolfgang A. Mehringer, Richard Kulpa, Hannes Rupprecht, Dino Poimann, Annemarie F. Laudanski, Bjoern M. Eskofier · 2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) · 2020
Assessment of personality traits is highly relevant in team sports in order to analyze the performance of an athlete under pressure when in competitive situations, for team-strategic decisions, to optimize command transmission, and ultimately to understand top-level performers. It further facilitates the development and application of personalized exercises, coaching to improve performance in competition, and can be considered a valuable criterion for talent scouting and development. The current state of the art method to assess personality traits in sports relies on validated questionnaires. However, these often provide non-sport-specific, subjective self-reported information and lack the ability to measure how these characteristics are reflected in context-based performance.We developed a virtual reality (VR) tool for the assessment of personality traits in team sports, in our case for soccer. An evaluation of this tool within a study with 24 subjects yielded a benchmark of its immersion through user experience and provided an objective description of athletes’ personalities based on performance indicators extracted from activity-tracking. Within the tool, we implemented two realistic virtual soccer environments to assess the motivational orientation of soccer players (i.e. action- and state-orientation) which we discerned from the gold standard questionnaire.Results show that user experience and presence of the implemented virtual environments scored significantly higher compared to benchmark measurements. Additionally, a significant difference between the two groups of action and state-oriented athletes could be observed. Measures of failure rate, pass accuracy, number of perceived opponents, and achieved bonus goals are parameters that differ significantly among the two athlete groups. These findings show that VR technology is applicable for the assessment of athletes’ motivational orientation and thus demonstrate the feasibility of virtual environments as functional game scenario-based assessment tools for athletes.