Eye Movement Feature Classification for Soccer Goalkeeper Expertise Identification in Virtual Reality

Abstract: The latest research in expertise assessment of soccer players has affirmed the importance of perceptual skills (especially for decision making) by focusing either on high experimental control or on a realistic presentation. To assess the perceptual skills of athletes in an optimized manner, we captured omnidirectional in-field scenes and showed these to 12 expert, 10 intermediate and 13 novice soccer goalkeepers on virtual reality glasses. All scenes were shown from the same natural goalkeeper perspective and ended after the return pass to the goalkeeper. Based on their 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 and provided valuable insight to inform the design of training systems to enhance perceptual skills of athletes.