Enhance your decision making and hand-eye coordination with this virtual mental skills training program.
There’s no shortage of fitness-focused apps on the Oculus Quest Store. From boxing simulators such as Thrill of the Fight to cardio-intensive rhythm games like Supernatural, VR offers everyone from trained athletes to casual gym-goers a plethora of virtual training solutions perfect for working up a sweat at home. But what about those looking to train their minds as well as their bodies?
REAKT Performance Trainer offers you a “virtual mental skills system” designed to improve your performance across a variety of sports and physical activities. According to developer NeuroTrainer, REAKT utilizes a combination of visual concentration and athletic awareness to increase your decision making, hand-eye coordination, and reaction time. The core experience revolves around blocking a series of increasingly-fast orbs while simultaneously dodging an arsenal of deadly bombs. As you progress through each session so too does the speed and rate at which the projectiles travel, resulting in an increasingly-chaotic playing field.
“We saw an opportunity to leverage the power of virtual reality and bring a high intensity environment normally reserved for elite athletes to everyone,” explained REAKT’s Jamie Moran in an official press release. “Physical training can only take a competitor so far. Once you start tapping into brain training, it almost feels like a superpower and you start to see improvements everywhere in your life – sports, gaming, getting locked in before a meeting – even while driving.”
REAKT features three primary game modes: Custom Training, Competition, and Recommended Training. Once you’ve completed the tutorial, the app analyzes your performance and generates a full break down of your strengths and weaknesses—including your streak length, reaction time, and coordination—and offers specific game adjustments catering to a wide range of sports, such as boxing, esports, racket sports, general fitness, diving, cycling, rugby, ice hockey, rowing, water polo, and various other physical activities. According to NeuroTrainer, the idea behind REAKT is to offer everyday people access to sports training technology usually reserved for professional athletes.
“REAKT is the evolution of physical training tools like the type of reaction boards or electronic agility tools that are often used in sports. We saw an opportunity to leverage our experience in designing VR tools to create a powerful performance training tool that anyone can use to improve their game,” added the company. “The science is built upon decades of sports vision research that we have been able to capture, augment and gamify in a highly immersive, fun and fast-paced VR environment.”
Despite having only spent a short amount of time with the app, I’m already noticing small, incremental improvements to my reaction time, though time will tell how effective this platform truly is.
REAKT Performance Trainer is available now on Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2 for $19.99.
Feature Image Credit: NeuroTrainer
