Exertion Interactions – interactions that require intense physical effort – have been attributed with physical, social and mental health benefits. Augmenting them with computing technology allows the extension of these benefits to support participants in geographically distant locations. My research investigates the use of exertion in distributed environments to facilitate the benefits between participants who cannot be in the same location together. This is known as Sports over a Distance. I have developed a system that allows distributed players to experience a full-body exertion game together which is inspired by combat sports. Evaluation revealed that such a game can function as stress relief and facilitate extreme physical exertion, despite the distance between the participants. I have also developed Jogging over a Distance that allows distributed social joggers to experience a run together despite being apart through an augmented audio channel. The system recognizes the runners’ exertion intensity and adjusts the audio channel accordingly: if a jogger is running faster, she/he hears the other runner coming from behind, if she/he is slower, the other person’s voice appears to be coming from the front. This allows joggers of different physical capabilities to run together, while maintaining the social motivational benefits of running together. The goal of this research is to create a theoretical framework that can guide the design of such systems by providing an understanding of the use of exertion in interactive systems.
Authors: Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Frank Vetere, Martin Gibbs
Event: SF08: Embodied Interaction in Mobile, Physical and Virtual Environments Workshop