Faking out athletes in the name of science: Every few years, there seems to be an article that describes how baseball players manage to accurately judge where a fly ball is going to land. It never occurred to me that there was something odd about the same “fact” being rediscovered every few years, until I read this paper, which pointed out that there were three competing ideas, and it was really hard to set up an experiment that would distinguish among them. Here in reality, you cannot change the laws of physics, but you can make it look like you have in virtual reality, and that turned out to be the key to the new experiments.
Basically, experienced ball players were placed in a virtual reality environment, and shown images of fly balls that followed trajectories that were physically impossible. Apparently, the successful model is called “optical acceleration cancellation,” which involves moving forwards or backwards based on elevation, and moving side-to-side to in a way that appears to cancel the ball’s motion from the player’s perspective.
Extra credit to the article for taking me to the Journal of Vision’s table of contents, which includes a visual for each paper, which happens to include a barn owl fitted with 3D glasses.
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