US Ski & Snowboard VR Training with STRIVR
From STRIVR:
Today, we are excited to announce that for the past couple years, STRIVR has been working with U.S. Ski & Snowboard, the Park City, UT-based national governing body for ski and snowboard in the USA. STRIVR has teamed up with the High Performance division of U.S. Ski & Snowboard to use VR to enhance athlete prep for competitions that take place around the world.
It all started when we got connected with Troy Taylor, the High Performance Director at U.S. Ski & Snowboard. After a few weeks of thinking about how STRIVR could help the sport of skiing (given our success with sports like football and basketball), we started working with Troy and his team, both with athletes competing in World Cup events and those rehabilitating from injury back at the organization’s Park City Center of Excellence HQ.
Why VR is great for skiing
The sport of ski racing appears simple, but there are multiple layers of detail that combine to make all four Alpine disciplines incredibly complicated (they are: Downhill and Super G, known as ‘speed’ disciplines, and Giant Slalom and Slalom, known as ‘tech’ disciplines). One of the key aspects is how athletes and coaches can prepare for competition, knowing they have an incredibly limited amount of time on each race course before competition starts. However, we believe we have found the answer: virtual reality. Capturing a run on a racecourse in VR would allow the athletes to re-live the course over and over again, clearly giving them a significant benefit. As we’ve seen with our other customers, VR is the next best thing to actually being there.