Virtual Reality as a Tool to Learn Interpersonal Coordination: Example of Team Rowing

The success of interpersonal activities strongly depends on the coordination between our movements and those of others. Learning to coordinate with other people requires a long training time and is often limited by the difficulty to have people available at the same time and to give them accurate and real-time feedbacks about their coordination. Using virtual reality and motion capture technologies, we investigated in an indoor team rowing situation the possibility for participants (i) to learn the skill of interpersonal coordination when training with a virtual teammate, (ii) to transfer it to synchronizing situations with a real teammate, and (iii) to accelerate learning with a real-time visual feedback. Our results show that participants improved their coordination with both virtual and real teammates, and that this improvement was better for participants who received the feedback. Generally our results demonstrate the interest of virtual reality for learning the coordination with other people and open promising training perspectives for team rowing but also for several other interpersonal activities.