Top athletes spend time visualising their next performance. This generally has a good effect on their results.
The process seems to rely on sportsmen and women being able mentally to step through some critical elements of their play, as if they were actually competing.
Today’s invention is a (highly secure) smartphone app which allows athletes to watch a simulation of themselves during their next event. For a soccer player, this might involve eg taking shots from set pieces.
A given player would be able to rehearse the preparation, target selection, etc days before a game and repeatedly view this from slightly different angles.
An avatar, wearing his shirt and with his haircut (and tattoos) would then be seen to run to the spot and score against a goalkeeper in the opponent’s colours and with appropriate crowd noise and other sound effects.
The app would also keep a record of target points selected and suggest some randomisation, so that the player’s actions would be harder to predict from game to game.
