Posted on 01/22/2010 3:20:48 AM PST by Pharmboy
Virtual-reality baseballs give researchers insight into long-standing mystery
Rockville, MD — While baseball fans still rank "The Catch" by Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series as one of the greatest baseball moments of all times, scientists see the feat as more of a puzzle: How does an outfielder get to the right place at the right time to catch a fly ball?
Thousands of fans (and hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers) saw Mays turn his back on a fly ball, race to the center field fence and catch the ball over his shoulder, seemingly a precise prediction of a fly ball's path that led his team to victory. According to a recent article in the Journal of Vision ("Catching Flyballs in Virtual Reality: A Critical Test of the Outfielder Problem"), the "outfielder problem" represents the definitive question of visual-motor control. How does the brain use visual information to guide action?
To test three theories that might explain an outfielder's ability to catch a fly ball, researcher Philip Fink, PhD, from Massey University in New Zealand and Patrick Foo, PhD, from the University of North Carolina at Ashville programmed Brown University's virtual reality lab, the VENLab, to produce realistic balls and simulate catches. The team then lobbed virtual fly balls to a dozen experienced ball players.
"The three existing theories all predict the same thing: successful catches with very similar behavior," said Brown researcher William Warren, PhD. "We realized that we could pull them apart by using virtual reality to create physically impossible fly ball trajectories."
Warren said their results support the idea that the ball players do not necessarily predict a ball's landing point based on the first part of its flight, a theory described as trajectory prediction. "Rather than predicting the landing point, the fielder might continuously track the visual motion of the ball, letting it lead him to the right place at the right time," Warren said.
Because the researchers were able to use the virtual reality lab to perturb the balls' vertical motion in ways that would not happen in reality, they were able to isolate different characteristics of each theory. The subjects tended to adjust their forward-backward movements depending on the perceived elevation angle of the incoming ball, and separately move from side to side to keep the ball at a constant bearing, consistent with the theory of optical acceleration cancellation (OAC). The third theory, linear optical trajectory (LOT), predicted that the outfielder will run in a direction that makes the visual image of the ball appear to travel in a straight line, adjusting both forward-backward and side-to-side movements together.
Fink said these results focus on the visual information a ball player receives, and that future studies could bring in other variables, such as the effect of the batter's movements or sound.
"As a first step we chose to concentrate on what seemed likely to be the most important factor," Fink said. "Fielders might also use information such as the batter's swing or the sound of the bat hitting the ball to help guide their movements."
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The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) is the largest eye and vision research organization in the world. Members include more than 12,500 eye and vision researchers from over 80 countries. ARVO encourages and assists research, training, publication and knowledge-sharing in vision and ophthalmology.
ARVO's Journal of Vision (www.journalofvision.org) is an online-only, peer-reviewed, open-access publication devoted to visual function in humans and animals. It explores topics such as spatial vision, perception, low vision, color vision and more, spanning the fields of neuroscience, psychology and psychophysics. JOV is known for hands-on datasets and models that users can manipulate online.
Keep Murph on first. My Boston friend says Bay is bad too.
And I have never been able to judge a fly ball. I have above average athletic abilities in most things I have ever tried, but not shagging flys.
Great! I think I just fell in love!
;0)
Some things are better left alone. It’s easy. To track down a flyball you say “oh shit” and start running.
Reminds of a definition of anesthesiology from med school: 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror (meaning that occasionally the surgical patient's blood pressure drops or some other catastrophe happens).
And we don’t get from point A to point B as we did .
Ah memories. I had the same problem until I started going back rather than in at the crack of the bat. Keeping the ball "in front" of me kept me out of trouble.
ping for later
I don’t know about the cost of such a grant but
It’s easy to imagine the value.
...with a number of additional and complex real-time perturbations. It makes me realize just how powerful our cognition and problem-solving skills are.
For me, the process illuminates God's creative power. This is just one more example. So much of we we "invent" comes directly from a better understanding of what was created.
A better understanding of how I catch a baseball (or try, really) could help us to defend ourselves against enemy attacks.
I love this.
It’s a simple triangulation issue. Shoot, missiles are programmed every day for this. Our brain is far superior to missile guidance systems which key on radar or thermal or visual signatures/profiles, etc. Pretty simple....we acquire the ‘target’ visually and our brain quickly plots an intercept course, supplying the proper signals to our limbs, etc. to respond accordingly.
Actually, they don't plot an intercept course ... they actively minimize a deviation from an intercept point ... if they lose lock, they miss. An outfielder can lose lock and still catch. There are several mechanisms going on in our brains, which these folks are trying to isolate.
Our brain is far superior to missile guidance systems
In many ways ... the focus of this research seems to be understanding that superiority, in order to design better guidance, tracking, and intercept machines.
I’m a little older now, and my old legs can’t get me there like they used to, but for me it was always a combination of the two.
I never took a front/back motion first. It was always left/right based on the position of the BAT at the instant it hit the ball.
THEN - when I was going in the correct lateral motion, I would track the trajectory. I never looked where I was going, always at the ball. I was always amazed that some guys could look away (like Willie Mays) and then re-locate the ball.
I never consciously thought about the sound, but maybe that plays in as well.
When I was in college, I played fast pitch softball, and if the ball went past the dirt in the air, it never touched the ground if I was anywhere close :-)
For a couple of years I couldn’t catch the ball with a huge net, precisely because my distance vision was going, and I didn’t realize it at first. I needed to see the bat to get the right jump.
Any good outfielder will tell you, it’s the LEGS that are your most effective weapon.
Good judgment comes from experience.
And where does experience come from?
Bad judgment.
[attributed to Mark Twain]
LOL....ok ok, not to get into the engineering of guidance systems (I wasn’t attempting to get to that level)....so yes, missiles may “actively minimize a deviation from an intercept point”, which is ‘engineer’ for “it’s trying to intercept”. Also, if an outfielder loses “lock”, it is possible to still make a catch, but it’s DAMNED hard. “I lost it in the lights”..........”I lost it in the sun”.........etc., come to mind.
I think we’re agreeing far more than we are disagreeing here.
There is another aspect of perception which might be touched upon in an outfielder’s example, but isn’t isolated to rational argument.
Faith is a system of perception, the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for.
In sports, all three systems of perception may be involved. Our physical senses, such as our 5 senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and smell; our rational senses, such as logic and memory recall of past events, rationalizing how common experience might play out; but also perhaps an element of faith, a system of perception in things not seen is also involved.
The Gnostics developed this into an art, however, they failed to first place faith through Christ, in what God provides, so their works were spiritually dead.
Nevertheless, if one is interested in the topic, there is a realm of the spiritual domain, available through faith in Christ, where one trains through the study of His Word, and is guided by God the Holy Spirit in how we continue to be set apart in fellowship with Him.
That fellowship isn’t limited to simple mental exercises, but is robustly involved in all things in life.
The outfielder problem is an interesting study in not only physics and mathematical logic, but also might reveal far more in regards to spiritual operation.
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