WHAT VIRTUAL REALITY CAN DO FOR SPORT ? A NARRATIVE REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Background: The physical fitness of athletes is well above the average of normal people. In addition, the response time has to be much better to reach the championship level, therefore the training demands have changed greatly over the decades. Traditional exercise will always be a fundamental factor in training, however, new technologies have to be considered in order to maximize their effectiveness. An example of a technology is Virtual Reality (VR), where the athlete's "awareness" to a purpose-built world, where they can gain experience and skills similar to the conditions during the competition. The aim of this narrative review was to determine the utilization of VR in training of competitive athletes. Methods: A literature review using PubMed has been conducted to examine the current state of the art in the available literature using VR in the aspect of competitive sports. For the complete review 157 articles on the use of VR in sports were identified, but no article indicated competitive sports. After the individual sports search, 6 articles were adopted for this review of the literature. Results: The presented research results show positive results with the use of VR for athletes on academic level. Not only do they improve the response time in decision-making during competitions, but they also have the opportunity to learn new schemes for use in competitions more quickly. The presented articles describe the performance of competitive athletes at the academic championship level, so there is still a lack of confirmed research on top athletes in the available literature. Conclusions: Based on the limited number of scientific articles available, it can be assumed that the use of Virtual Reality has a positive impact even on the development of competitive athletes in order to achieve the best possible performance and new skills. It is not possible to make preliminary conclusions and further research is needed on the leading athletes in the respective sports