A Systematic Review of Immersive Technologies for Physical Training in Fitness and Sports

The increased availability of immersive headsets in the games industry has promoted wide adoption of immersive technology amongst consumers. The benefits of spatial freedom and agency for body movements in virtual reality pave the way for everyday fitness and physical training applications. We conducted a systematic review through ACM Digital Library, IEEEXplore, and Scopus, to investigate how immersive technologies have been applied for physical training in fitness and sports. Our review included all peer-reviewed papers, published and written in English, discussing all forms of hardware for VR, AR, and MR technologies, targeted towards healthy population. We excluded applications for clinical populations and treatment of specific diseases, and all non-peer reviewed articles like position papers, workshops, tutorials, and magazine columns. From the shortlisted 144 papers, we summarize the development trends of immersive technologies and highlight the challenges of designing immersive technologies for everyday fitness. We also provide recommendations for future work and highlight the need to support better collaboration with industry partners, trainer-trainee experiences, and social dynamics of sports for designing better experiences.