ABSTRACT
While many interactive technologies associated with sports performance focus on “what you do,” this chapter focuses on “what you see” in reactive sports such as tennis, soccer, baseball, and cricket. Reactive sports skills, often executed in under one second, are literally beyond the limitations of human perception. Yet elite athletes succeed with such ease that their performance appears to be instinctive. Sports expertise researchers have not only provided frameworks and findings to understand reactive sports skills but also have devised research methods that can be repurposed into interactive technologies for training reactive skills. Technologies such as virtual reality and video-occlusion can bring the development of sports instincts into a deliberate practice context, thereby accelerating learning curves in efficient and safe ways that don’t further tax athletes’ bodies or require practice opponents. Beyond sports, systematically training reactive skills has implications for accelerating expertise in other domains that require rapid reactions, such as emergency medicine and law enforcement.
