I stand in the darkened silence of a rectangular chamber, 8 meters long and 6 meters wide, balanced on the tips of my toes. On the wall in front of me are the outlines of two circles. Beyond these walls is an enormous insulated hangar decked with artificial grass and filled with highly paid professional soccer players. The lower circle glows a brilliant white in the dim light. I brace, as though waiting for the Death Star to ready its superlaser.
One second passes.
Two seconds.
Clunk—pause—whoosh!
A soccer ball fires from the illuminated hole, accelerating to 35 miles per hour and shooting through the darkness, before slapping onto my right foot and spinning awkwardly off behind. I turn, and it takes another two touches before I’ve brought the ball fully under my control. A professional player would have managed it in one, and would have done so without making a sound. The next four balls are fired with similarly dismal outcomes. I fear that I am going to be escorted from the facility on the grounds of supreme incompetence.
There is, however, a glimmer of hope. Okkulo, the English company that has created this training environment, has just published research that found that consistent training under restricted lighting can have remarkable effects on certain visual motor skills. Spend enough time doing drills in this specially lit environment, and I might just end up being a better player in the park on a Saturday afternoon.
“The athlete will go inside of this box, and when they come out they’ll be better prepared for their match or for their training,” suggests Okkulo’s founder, Mel O’Connor. The idea is simple: The more you train the processes that coordinate the eyes, body, and brain during difficult light conditions, the faster and more refined their coordination should be under normal light. “We can speed up and slow down the information between the eye and the brain, and that in turn works with the [connection between] the brain and the muscle,” O’Connor says. “It’s about maximizing the processing power.”
I am trialling Okkulo’s technology at Thorp Arch in West Yorkshire, a $6 million sports facility that serves as base camp for one of England’s top soccer clubs—Leeds United. Today, I’m using a temporary model designed to be toured around sports clubs and universities. It’s been here at Leeds for six weeks. Should they opt for a permanent installation, Okkulo’s in-house manufacturing process can create a bespoke model in collaboration with the club’s goalkeeping coaches and sports scientists.
The overhead lights change from being simply dim to a dark, low-level blue. O’Connor watches from the side of the chamber, while Jack Woodburn, the company’s head of sports science, controls the lighting and ball-release mechanisms from a laptop on the other side of the wall. I’m working at a specifically chosen frequency of light that forces a 10 percent delay in the processing speed between the eye and the brain.
Okkulo can switch between different light modes that have varying effects on the brain’s processing of visual information. Low blue light is used to test visual focus and anticipation; green light is cruelly designed to challenge our peripheral vision and powers of identification. Switching to dim red light alters powers of depth perception. The final, boss-level light mode combines aspects of all three settings for a 23 percent reduction in eye, brain, and muscle coordination. It feels almost psychedelic.
Another ball fires out under Okkulo’s blue lights, and I feel as though my body belongs to someone else, as though the ball has found a second wind halfway through its flight path and is accelerating past the point where it would naturally begin to slow. I seem to have accidentally consumed three beers, three chasers, and a tequila slammer.
Next, O’Connor and I toss a tennis ball back and forth. The best way to describe the sensation is to try and recall the first time you wore 3D glasses at the cinema—both familiar and unerring at once.
Five more soccer balls are fired my way. I’m warming up, I think, until O’Connor switches Okkulo to its green light setting and bounces a tennis ball gently off the wall towards me. I’m left hopelessly grasping at air. I never claimed to be much of a soccer player, but it is a different feeling entirely to find yourself suddenly unable to play catch.
But give it enough time, and the brain begins to adapt. Twenty-two professional soccer players at Sunderland AFC—another big club with a storied history, currently playing in the second tier of English soccer—recently took part in a six-week study of Okkulo. First, the players had their visual-motor skills assessed with software. Onscreen tests measured how well they could focus on small moving objects, their reaction times, and their peripheral vision. The software also assessed how well they could anticipate the movement of an object, and how much time they needed to recognize a target object surrounded by other distracting stimuli.
Then they were split into two equal groups and completed training drills twice a week under the supervision of an Okkulo coach—one group using Okkulo’s lighting system, and the other under normal conditions. Outside these sessions, both groups trained as normal. Then, after six weeks, they had their visual-motor skills reassessed using the software.
Compared to the control group, on average players using the Okkulo system found that their recognition time was enhanced by almost 60 percent, allowing them to identify relevant activity faster among crowded fields. Furthermore, their identification of stimuli in their peripheral vision was 10 percent more accurate and 20 percent quicker, their depth perception 45 percent more accurate, and their sensory reaction time up by 17 percent.
The overall result for those in the study, the company claims, is a 36.3 percent improvement in motor reaction time—meaning the players appeared both quicker and more effective in responding to stimuli. When reassessed with the software, they were 17 percent faster in stopping one action, then 36.3 percent faster in beginning the next. Should this improvement be replicable in a real-world, in-game sports scenario, it could represent a holy grail in improving sporting performance.
O’Connor began to dream up Okkulo more than 20 years ago while working on a film set as a costume designer, having become fascinated by how the cameras reacted to different types of light. He contacted a scientist who’d written a paper on seeing movement in the dark—and who, by pure chance, lived only 20 minutes down the road—and by the end of the afternoon the pair were scheming on how this might relate to sports training, over a cup of tea. Within four weeks they were given a £20,000 research grant from the University of Durham and started work on a rudimentary predecessor of Okkulo, which they tested out with the university’s cricket team.
This initial research elicited encouraging results. Cricketers subjected to lower light levels in training saw greater improvement in their batting skills than those in the equivalent control group. Later case studies, including a remarkable improvement in match day performance for a goalkeeper in the English Football League, indicated similar improvements—but up until the release of this latest study, O’Connor had been unable to objectively explain how his technology seemed to be bettering athletic performance. “We could see that we were improving athletes, but we needed to find out exactly why [the technology] was doing that. Now we’ve got it in data.”
Alex Cairns, a vastly experienced goalkeeper at Leeds United with more than 300 appearances in the English Football League, describes working with Okkulu as a “shock to the system.” For his goalkeeper teammate Harry Christy, 10 years younger and at the other end of his career, time spent training in the chamber was an opportunity to be grabbed with both hands: “I’m looking for every little gain I can get, every edge I can have over every other goalkeeper in the country,” Christy says. Neither goalkeeper was involved in the study at Sunderland AFC.
“What’s interesting is that they haven’t just changed the light levels, they’ve changed the specific quality and waves of that light,” says Niall Macfarlane, a professor in physiology and sports science at the University of Glasgow who wasn’t involved in the research. Experimenting with different types of low light—blue, red, green—has far more scope for generating improvements than just using dimmed light on its own, he believes.
Macfarlane does, however, harbor some reservations about how smoothly the research’s positive results would be translated into improvements in performance in a real-life soccer match. “I think it is far better suited to something like baseball or cricket where you can replicate the game scenario more closely,” he says. Unlike in the highly variable environment of a soccer game, with batting sports “you know where the ball is going to come from, you know roughly the speed it’s going to come at, so [through the training] you can refine the tracking of that ball and the consistency of the contact.”
It is little surprise then that when I arrived earlier this afternoon, O’Connor was in the process of booking flights to Arizona. He is currently in contact with more than half of the teams in Major League Baseball.
But there’s still more work to do. Further research is needed to see how long the benefits of the light training last, as well as to confirm that there was no performance bias at work in the recent study—it was obvious to the participants which group was receiving the Okkulo intervention and which was not, which may have subconsciously influenced the participants’ performance in testing. Future tests could account for this by involving some lighting adjustment for the control group as well, to avoid indicating to the participants which group they are in.
Outside of elite sports, Okkulo is in the early stages of collaborating with several universities to delve deeper into the potential medical benefits of the technology, leading O’Connor to imagine a future in which hospitals and clinics have ambient light rooms to help patients to recover from severe brain injuries or paralysis. He hopes one day to move Okkulo into the home use and commercial gym sectors, following in the footsteps of companies such as Peloton.
But for now, it is my turn. Redemption awaits. The room returns to normal light levels. I stand on my mark and wait to receive the ball. My systems are finely tuned, my heart rate is slightly raised, and my senses are on high alert. It’s time for me to flourish.
Clunk—pause—whoosh!
I control the ball. It’s perfect. Deft and soundless, falling under my spell like a lost duckling returning gratefully to the embrace of its nest. It belongs here. I experience a few seconds of immense pride before O’Connor reveals that we’ve been working with a ball-speed setting recommended for 10-year-olds. The technology may be exemplary, but even science cannot perform miracles.