3/6 Catching Fly Balls

I found today's topic to be particularly interesting, probably because I'm a huge baseball fan (go Dodgers!). As I mentioned in class, I think the reasoning behind this research is extremely applicable and important, even if actually catching fly balls isn't animated as often as, say, walking. But I think it's really important to realize that searching for the optimal motion is almost always going to be the wrong motion, at least when you're talking about humans. What people do, and what looks natural, is hardly ever optimal. So for this example, people don't immediately move to where the ball is going to land - they adjust. This actually reminded me of a computer game I used to play back in elementary school called Backyard Baseball, so I looked it up to see how the characters caught the ball. Of course, they were pretty clumsy because all of the characters are supposed to be kids, and I think when you're playing the outfield you just click on the character you want to try to catch it. So I thought this game might have a good example of this type of research, but it's so basic (from the YouTube videos at least) that it doesn't seem to have much in common besides baseball. Here's a video, though, in case you want to check it out. I used to play this all the time with my little brother!

Anyway, I was wondering if the research noted any differences between left- and right-handed players, or if they even used test subjects with different dominant hands. When we saw the graph showing where the players walked when catching the balls, it was separated into four quadrants depending on where the ball was landing. The front and back didn't look too different, but I noticed the paths differed from each other more on one side than the other. I thought this might be due to whether the player was left- or right-handed, but it didn't seem like the paper mentioned this at all. It would be interesting to see how a person's dominant hand affects their motions.