Eye-tracking company SyncThink is entering the world of athletic cognitive training as part of a new partnership with mixed-reality headset maker Magic Leap.
The neuroscience company has long been in the business of helping athletes who have suffered head trauma, such as concussions, recuperate. Its virtual reality training platform on Samsung Gear VR has fed players brain exercises to enable them to slowly improve cognitive function and return to the field. A new partnership with Magic Leap, however, may also help healthy athletes train and reach heightened levels of performance.
As part of Magic Leap’s digital biomarker program, SyncThink has worked closely with the tech company’s health care team to build out sophisticated medical-grade use cases for eye-tracking. Magic Leap provides an augmented reality experience that enables end users to interact with the physical world around them. That mixed with the eye-tracking science has enabled SyncThink to devise new immersive training ideas.
“You’re always trying to place yourself in a setting that most closely resembles your in-game performance,” said SyncThink Chief Technology Officer Daniel Beeler, in an interview at CES. “Having an augmented or mixed reality setting gets you much closer to that environment. Whether you’re actually on-field or you’re in your normal training environment, this can be a technology that helps improve that.”
SyncThink has worked with a number of professional sports teams in the past, including the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks. Magic Leap also has a partnership with the NBA, which might open SyncThink up to additional opportunities within the league.
“Those clients are equally focused on injury as they are for performance and use our technology for both,” Beeler said. “It’s a perfect test bed for us to develop these technologies and to test them at an elite level.”
The company has identified baseball as another area of focus, with SyncThink sending a number of executives to MLB’s Winter Meetings at the end of 2018 to pitch the benefits of its eye-tracking technology. Now, through Magic Leap, athletes aren’t just performing reps in an isolated setting, but are able to do them in realistic situations where their visual performance can be evaluated as they move around a fixed space attempting to hit, catch, or field balls.
“You can think of baseball paradigms where you’re using eye-tracking performance to evaluate a baseball player’s batting performance and doing that in real time,” Beeler said. “If you’re an injured athlete, you can’t necessarily get into the batting cage and take practice, so this is a mechanism to stay in shape, to improve performance, to accelerate any recovery from an injury and do that in a platform that’s accessible at all levels. Hitting balls, fielding balls … all of this requires dynamic head motion. If you’re moving, that incorporates vestibular systems as well. Those are all systems that we want to quantify, provide biofeedback to the user, so they can understand their performance in real time, work on areas where they might have a deficiency, and ultimately accelerate that training to get back on the field or training for better on-field performance.”
SyncThink has worked with clients in the past to evaluate performance. For example, it has partnered with the military to characterize sleep deprivation fatigue, which plays a factor in performance. But with access to the Magic Leap platform, SyncThink is envisioning ways to expand these efforts in both sports and esports.
“We’re trying to build that out to facilitate more dynamic measurements on the performance, integrate more immersive training paradigms, engage the user more, and leverage next-generation visualization technologies to make that happen,” Beeler said.
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