Storying sports injury experiences in VR

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Project details

Storying sports injury experiences in VR

Virtual and extended realities MA collaborative project, UWE Bristol 2023

Immerse yourself in the frustrating and exhausting world of the injured athlete in this virtual reality experience, while understanding the sports psychology that underpins their experience. Based on one of the six narratives outlined in research paper “Storying Sports Injury Experiences of Elite Track Athletes: A Narrative Analysis” (Everard, Wadey and Howells, 2021).

Goal

User goal

Create an interactive VR/MR headset experience that:

Helps runners reframe their injury experience through a narrative lens

It will do this by:

Helping runners understand the role socio-cultural narratives[1] can have on injury experience

Uncovering which of the dominant injury narratives[1] is closest to the runner’s current approach to injury

Suggesting an alternative injury narrative

Team goal

Create an VR/MR headset experience that:

meets the requirements of the XR MA course (collaborative, creative artefact that examines an emerging topic in Virtual, Augmented, Mixed or Extended Reality of the standard that can be expected of submissions to relevant international film festivals or equivalent)

acts as a showcase to enable Jon to gain employment in XR

solves a real problem

Audience

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Runners with performance goals (competitive amateurs up to elites) Aged 18-24 (Gen-Z) Why: getting runners to think about their approach to injury early in their career can have the most impact 18+ is more accessible user testing group, adults can decide if they want to participate and within the university there at

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Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve and for who?

Help runners improve their injury experience from a sports psychology perspective.

Why?

Injury affects a lot of runners: 50% of runners experience an injury each year that prevents them from running for a period of time, and 25% of runners are injured at any given time[2].

Solution

Why sports injury narratives?

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The narratives that are ‘out there’ are powerful resources in scaffolding how athletes come to make sense of their experiences The type of story an injured athlete tells will shape how they think, feel, and behave in relation to their injury experiences Stories can enable/constrain individuals in different ways Multiplicity of injury narratives offers athletes greater opportunity and flexibility in framing and re-framing their injury experiences as necessary Dr Ciara Everard - “Working with injured athletes: Sports injury narratives” [Powerpoint Presentation]

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Technical

Target device / hardware

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Hardware: Oculus Quest 2 and Quest Pro standalone Software: Unity with Oculus SDK

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License

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The Resilience Narrative (VR/MR project)⁠

Jon Higgins ⁠

We hope to eventually license under

CC BY 4.0 ⁠

but currently, the experience design is based around concepts from 2 research papers, both of which are licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0 which does not permit derivative works, so will need to check with the author we have permission to use concepts in their research papers:

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Storying Sports Injury Experiences of Elite Track Athletes: A Narrative Analysis⁠

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Construction and communication of evidence-based video narratives in elite sport: Knowledge translation of sports injury experiences⁠

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Also, the project currently uses assets that can be used for education only which may affect licencing

This project uses a Creative Commons license so other people can learn from or re-use parts of this project, hopefully contributing to the XR and sports psychology fields.