Game-day football visualization experience on dissimilar virtual reality platforms

College football recruiting is a competitive process. Athletic administrations attempt to gain an edge by bringing recruits to a home game, highlighting the atmosphere unique to campus. This is however not always possible since most recruiting efforts happen off-season. So, they relate the football game experience through video recordings and visits to football facilities. While these substitutes provide a general idea of a game, they cannot capture the feeling of playing while cheered on by a crowd of 55,000 people. To address this challenge and improve the recruitment process, the Iowa State University (ISU) athletic department and the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC) teamed up to build an alternative to the game-day experience using the world’s highest resolution six-sided virtual reality (VR) environment - the C6, and a portable low-cost head-mounted display (HMD) system. This paper presents techniques used in the development of the immersive and portable VR environments followed by validation of the work through quantifying immersion and presence through a formal user study. Results from the user study indicate that both the HMD and C6 are an improvement over the standard practice of showing videos to convey the atmosphere of an ISU Cyclone football game. In addition, both the C6 and HMD were scored similar in immersion and presence categories. This indicates that the low-cost portable HMD version of the application produces minimal trade off in experience for a fraction of the cost.

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