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competitive juices flowing. “It’s not like a test,” he says of the programs that use player interaction. “It’s a competition you get hooked on, but you are actually improving your hand- eye coordination.” Nike has some hardware to go with it, too. The Vapor Strobe glasses remove visual senses during practice—the lenses were en- gineered to strobe on and off, removing an athlete’s ability to see out of one or both lenses for bursts of time. Those bursts train

Playing with one eye? Vapor Strobe glasses train the brain to react to non-visual cues.

the brain to react and perform with less infor- mation. Doing more with less in practice translates to an even greater reward when bombarded with sensory overload during the fast-paced movement of a professional sporting event. “We give them less and less information, forc- ing the athletes to utilize what we give them more efficiently,” says Dr. Al- len Reichow, Nike’s lead sensory performance re- searcher, “essentially do- ing stress training on the sensory system.”

stem in sports: engineering

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