When Vietnamese athlete Nguyen Thanh Hien Linh entered his first online taekwondo competition in Singapore in 2024, he had little idea what he was doing.
“I was kicking in the air,” the 21-year-old recalled. Despite his background as a national taekwondo champion, he struggled in the online arena without a clue about strategy, skills or how the technology worked.
Two years later, he won a gold medal in a recent online taekwondo competition in Malaysia and became part of the growing martial arts community across Southeast Asia.
The relatively unknown and experimental virtual Taekwondo is now emerging as an organized competitive discipline. Developed jointly by World Taekwondo and Singapore-based tech company Refract Technologies, it combines virtual reality technology with traditional taekwondo techniques to appeal to tech-savvy young athletes.
Competitors wear virtual reality (VR) headsets that transport them into a 3D digital arena, and wear motion-tracking sensors on their backs, thighs and thighs. They use their bodies to control digital signals in non-contact offline matches, where each quick and well-timed strike depletes an opponent’s virtual health bar.
Unlike traditional taekwondo where competitors are separated by age, weight and gender, virtual taekwondo puts everyone on a digital level playing field.
