AS THE NEW York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs prepare for the deciding Game 5 of the NBA Finals in June, most of Scott Foster's pregame routine is what you would expect for a referee. Foster, in his 32nd season as an NBA ref, does typical warmups and stretches, helms the officiating crew's pregame meeting and manages some logistics such as selecting the game ball he'll later toss for the opening tip.
Inside the officials locker room, though, Foster is doing something else altogether to prepare for the biggest game of the season. An hour to 90 minutes before tipoff, Foster dons a Meta Quest 3 virtual reality headset he keeps with him on the road for every game.
He pulls up a program in which 10 virtual balls move around in his sight line, seven green and three orange. He's instructed to track the three orange balls.
Then the orange balls turn green, blending in with the others. Foster is prompted to continue tracking the original three until the balls stop moving, when he's asked to correctly identify them.
"If I get a perfect score on the first stage, I'm like, 'Oh, I'm going to have a good game tonight,'" Foster tells ESPN. If he doesn't, he repeats it until he's error-free.
The drill gets more complex from there. Foster has to use headset joysticks to "block" separate balls that are launched at him, all without losing track of the three balls he's monitoring.
Later, a virtual boomerang is tossed in his direction and he's told to choose whether or not it will "hit" him on its current path; his score drops if he answers incorrectly or loses track of one of his initial three balls in the process. It typically takes Foster around 15 minutes to complete the full drill, including possible repetitions for errors.
Foster is using what's known as cognitive priming, designed to warm him up for the intense visual and processing load that comes with officiating an NBA basketball game. This is one of a few such drills Foster has available, each with its own nuances.
Foster and nearly a dozen other NBA refs have visited Ares Elite Sports Vision, a high-performance vision clinic in the Indianapolis area, in the past few years. Many are ongoing clients, carrying VR headsets and other tech with them on the road for virtual sessions and visiting the facility when they're in town.
"It's like jumping jacks for your eyes and your brain," says Dr. Joe LaPlaca, founder of Ares.
LaPlaca designs personalized programs for each of his clients. Some are focused primarily on pregame warmups, while others are for maintenance sessions between games.
"It's almost like eye yoga, if you will," says Marc Davis, a 28-year veteran referee and another Finals regular who uses cognitive priming before every game. "We spend so much time warming up our bodies before the game.
But I literally take 10 minutes and I warm up my eyes and my reactions." Cognitive training like this is becoming all the rage in sports, and not just for refs. Ares works with clients across the landscape, particularly athletes who rely on visual processing to drive their performance -- hockey goalies, golfers, auto racing drivers and other groups have begun diving headfirst into cognitive programs.
Multiple teams have even outfitted their home facilities with tech straight out of the Ares lab. They aren't the only vendor in the space, either.
The trend isn't confined to high-level sports. Aided by improving technology, eye-based cognitive assessments and training methods have begun to make a massive impact in the medical world -- and might even hold the key to more effectively diagnosing and treating some of humanity's most well-known conditions.
"ALMOST EVERY ORGAN in the human body has a vital sign. Whether it's the lungs, heart, blood," says Mark Edwards, co-founder and CEO of ViewMind, a leader in brain health tracking.
"But we don't have a vital sign for the brain." Edwards says ViewMind wants to change that. They're one of a few major entities in the cognitive field working to understand more about our brains using the eyes as their primary gateway.
The medical community has long hypothesized basic connections between the eyes and brain, and looked to technology to help identify them. The first commercial fundus camera was invented a century ago in 1926, allowing for imaging of the back of the eye.
This marked a major improvement in science's ability to understand the structure of the retina and its impact on visual processing. Technology improved over subsequent decades, helpi