Fig. 2: Overview of REVERIE system development and evaluation.

a, Schematic of REVERIE system development and system evaluation. Professional coaches provide feedback to build the VR sports environment and coach templates. A transformer-based virtual coaching agent, REVERIE Coach, is trained to guide adolescents. Participants engage in table tennis or soccer using VR equipment and sport-specific controllers, performing guided motions with REVERIE Coach instruction. AI–human interactions during VR therapy are used to adaptively optimize REVERIE Coach through deep reinforcement learning. This strategy addresses challenges of participants during VR sports interventions, enabling empathetic sports interventions. System evaluations demonstrate that the REVERIE system delivers an immersive VR sports experience with minimal cybersickness, biomechanical performance comparable to real-world sports and an AI–human collaborative coaching tool. b, Design of the RCT. In this RCT, 227 adolescents with excess body weight were randomly allocated into the physical sports group, the REVERIE sports group or the control group. Both sports groups contained two sport types including table tennis and soccer. The effects of interventions were assessed in terms of metabolic, physical, psychological and cognitive outcomes. Meanwhile, fMRI and multi-omics analyses (including metagenomics, metabolomics, lipidomics and proteomics) were conducted.