Helix
The Genesis and Purpose of the Helix
In the high-stakes world of elite sports, gaining a competitive edge often means looking beyond the training pitch. Recognizing that modern team sports demand extraordinary perceptual and cognitive abilities, the TSG ResearchLab, in collaboration with skills.lab, developed the Helix-Arena. The core motivation behind its creation was to diagnose, train, and enhance the cognitive abilities of athletes in a way that traditional methods could not. Most team sport athletes operate in a dynamic 360° environment, where they must process vast amounts of visual information from all directions to make split-second decisions. The Helix was built to simulate and train for precisely this complex reality.
The Helix is a cylindrical arena with a seamless 360° projection screen. This innovative setup allows for the creation of immersive virtual environments without the need for VR goggles, which can be cumbersome and disorienting. Inside, an athlete is surrounded by interactive scenarios, from tracking multiple moving objects to reacting to game-like situations. The use of the Helix is twofold: diagnostics and training. As a diagnostic tool, it can objectively measure an athlete's fundamental perceptual-cognitive skills, such as visual-spatial attention, working memory, and decision-making speed, independent of their specific sport. As a training tool, it provides a platform for targeted interventions designed to improve these cognitive functions. By simulating challenging scenarios in a controlled, repeatable manner, the Helix aims to accelerate player development and push the boundaries of athletic performance.
Diverse Applications – From Elite Sports to Clinical Rehabilitation
The versatility of the Helix Arena's technology allows its application to extend far beyond the football pitch, demonstrating its potential in vastly different fields. Two key projects highlight its diverse use cases: one focused on elite athlete development and the other on post-stroke rehabilitation.
1. Project: Cognitive Function Assessment and Training in Sports
This project, in partnership with Goethe University Frankfurt, aimed to validate the Helix as a tool for developing elite athletes. The central methodology involved a "360° Multiple Object Tracking" (360-MOT) task, where athletes had to track multiple moving targets among distractors in the immersive environment. The research confirmed that the 360-MOT task is a reliable instrument for diagnosing perceptual-cognitive abilities, particularly visual-spatial attention and working memory. Studies showed that these abilities improved with age and were more consolidated in elite-level youth players, underscoring their importance for progressing to the professional level. A connection was also established between 360-MOT performance and specific football skills like passing accuracy and defensive behavior. This project successfully demonstrated the Helix's capability as a diagnostic tool for targeted cognitive assessment.
Goethe Universität Executive Functions
2. Project: Post-Stroke Rehabilitation in the 360° Helix Arena
In collaboration with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim and the Schmieder Clinics in Heidelberg, this project explored a completely different application: aiding the recovery of stroke patients. Traditional cognitive rehabilitation is often confined to PC-based exercises. The Helix offers a more engaging and holistic alternative. It provides an immersive, near-real-world training environment without requiring patients to wear VR headsets. The training tasks encourage head and body movements, engaging not only cognitive functions but also motor skills and balance. A key finding was the potential positive influence on a patient's general affect, or mood, which is a critical factor in the recovery process. Results from both healthy subjects and a patient sample showed positive trends in improving attention and affect.
A Critical Discussion on the Transfer of Training
While the Helix-Arena projects have demonstrated success in diagnostics and task-specific training, they also highlight a central challenge in cognitive science: the concept of "transfer." The project on cognitive training for athletes concluded that training with the 360-MOT task only led to task-specific improvements, without significant transfer effects to sports performance. In other words, while players got better at the MOT game, this improvement did not translate to better performance on the pitch. It seems like a stronger integration of realistic requirements is necessary to promote transfer effects.
This finding perfectly illustrates the distinction between "near transfer" and "far transfer”:
- Near Transfer occurs when training on one task improves performance on a very similar task. The athletes improving their 360-MOT scores is a classic example of near transfer.
- Far Transfer is the goal of most generic cognitive training: the idea that improving a general skill (like object tracking) will transfer to a dissimilar and complex activity (like playing football).
Extensive psychological and motor learning research shows that far transfer is very rare. Simply training a general cognitive skill in isolation is unlikely to enhance complex, real-world performance. This critical perspective reinforces the project's own conclusion: for a tool like the Helix to be truly effective for performance enhancement, it must move beyond generic tasks and simulate the specific, complex, and chaotic demands of the actual sport.
Tactical Learning and Decision-Making in the Helix
Footballers constantly choose among numerous options on the field. Whether it's a shot on goal or a pass through the gap in attack, or dropping deep versus pressing the opponent in defence, good players are characterized by their ability to make the optimal decision at the right moment. While decision-making can be improved by on-field training, time on the field is limited due to the physical demands on players. For this reason, there has been an ongoing quest to enhance players' decision-making off the pitch through specialized perceptual-cognitive training.
A popular approach to testing and training decision-making off the pitch is video-based tests in which players watch a video clip and have to decide where to pass at the end. 2D screens were often used to show the video clip. Decisions were explained verbally. However, these decisions are not game-like. A 2D video cannot replicate the challenges of perceiving information in a 360° radius. A verbal explanation, instead of executing the action, further simplifies the decision and makes the timing of actions obsolete. When virtual reality (VR) simulations were used to recreate the 360° requirements of football, players' movements often appeared unrealistic. In addition, peripheral vision, which is of great importance in football, is limited in VR headsets. All of these constraints limit the transfer to on-pitch performance.
This is why we created a new game simulation for the Helix Arena that addresses these limitations:
- The Helix offers a representative viewpoint with a first-person perspective.
- It allows players to execute a pass with a real ball, at precisely the right moment.
- The game simulation is based on real match skeletal data, consisting of 25 limb positions per player and frame, ensuring realistic player movements and kinematics.
- The Helix preserves the natural and unconstrained field of view of participants, making sure that players can fully utilize their peripheral vision.
Use cases of the new game simulation in the Helix
The new game simulation in the Helix Arena enables us to investigate the effectiveness and possibilities of testing and training perceptual-cognitive skills in football, focusing on passing decisions. Given the differences in visual fields between VR headsets and the Helix Arena, we will analyse whether these variations lead to differences in gaze behaviour between the two settings. This, in turn, may affect decision-making performance as well as the reliability and validity of the tests. By further exploring gaze behaviour in football via eye tracking technology, we aim to identify what constitutes effective gaze behaviour by comparing good and bad decisions.
For training, VR allows us to highlight relevant information – such as open teammates or runs in behind – to guide gaze behaviour and potentially improve players’ perception and decision-making in crucial moments. After a decision is made, players can receive feedback via an automated machine-learning-powered scoring system that evaluates every passing option based on its risk and reward profile.
