In top-level wheelchair curling, the difference between gold and no medal is measured in millimeters. It’s a physics problem played in the mind as athletes try to envisage how a 40-pound granite stone should slide down an ice sheet.
Virtual Ice, Real Strategy
The physical training is grueling and limited by the availability of ice. However, for athletes preparing for the Milano Cortina Paralympic Games, some new training locations have opened in the last two years, such as the Metaverse.
Several national teams have started using heavily customized Virtual Reality setups to get in “mental reps” without the physical toll. However, standard off-the-shelf VR posed one major challenge for the athletes: the code assumed users were standing up. The angles were all wrong, and so were the crucial curling perspectives.
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But there’s always room for innovation. Developers collaborated with institutions like Red Deer Polytechnic to incorporate new parameters into the VR environment, catering to a seated perspective. It wasn’t just a matter of lowering the camera; developers also had to retrain the physics engine to model stones thrown from a wheelchair height accurately.
Re-Engineering the Throw Height
Now Paralympians can put on a headset and find themselves on a perfectly rendered virtual ice sheet. Hundreds of stones can be thrown in an hour as high-risk strategies are played out and the physics of collisions are explored in “God Mode” before the universe resets in an instant.
As the Paralympic athletes take to the ice in Italy this March, their physical muscles will be rested, but their strategic minds will have already played these games thousands of times in the digital realm.
