Players stand inside a giant tent, and footballs are fired at them under different light conditions and at different speeds to help sharpen their response times. The changing light levels manipulate how fast the ball appears to be moving, making it more difficult for the visual system and brain to process a ball’s movement, pushing the delay in processing from 200 milliseconds to 250. That adds a further two metres of “blindness” to any decision an athlete makes.
Initially, that means a lot of getting hit in the head and body by wayward balls you’re unable to react to. Hladký, in his first trials with OKKULO, ended up catching some shots from OKKULO’s ball cannon with his neck. But the body adapts and recognizes it needs to take decisive action earlier. “You're constantly recalibrating your brain to interact with your environment,” says Stockman. The process becomes rewired to the low light levels—which means when you’re back in normal light, time seems to slow down and your brain makes more measured decisions about where a ball’s likely to go. “We make them see six feet better off,” says Mel O’Connor, founder of OKKULO.
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