Eye Movement Feature Classification for Soccer Expertise Identification in Virtual Reality

Latest research in expertise assessment of soccer players pronounced the importance of perceptual skills. Former research focused either on high experimental control or natural presentation mode. To assess perceptual skills of athletes, in an optimized manner, we captured omnidirectional in-field scenes, showed to 12 expert, 9 intermediate and 13 novice goalkeepers from soccer on virtual reality glasses. All scenes where shown from the same natural goalkeeper perspective and ended after the return pass to the goalkeeper. Based on their responses and gaze behavior we classified their expertise with common machine learning techniques. This pilot study shows promising results for objective classification of goalkeepers expertise based on their gaze behaviour.