The Quest for the Perfect ExerGame

Today I woke up early and in attempt to try and kick-start my body clock, I went for a workout in the hotel gym. Of course I couldn’t resist the opportunity to check out the competition (i.e. what ExerGaming is up against). Having had a go it virtual reality yesterday, it was time for some actually reality today with a twist…

“Aktuelle” is the german word for news or current affairs and there is a TV news program of the same title. So the challenge I set my self was to workout whilst watching the news on a large screen TV (it was that or the weather channel!).

I set the exercise back at level 14/25 and held a steady 92 rpm for 10 minutes which resulted in a heart rate of around 148 bpm. In all honesty I have to say it was one of the longest 10 minutes of exercise of my life. Whether it was the dulcet tones of the presenters or the down beat stories they were reporting I will never know, but it was not a pleasant experience. Not much competition there then, give me an ExerGame any day.

I don’t have any plans to conduct a larger study, but I the title of the paper would be something like “Watching TV News whilst Exercising Impacts Negatively on Ratings of Perceived Exertion.” No chance of a Noble prize, but more than likely a mention in the Annals of Improbable Research.

I was able to call in yesterday to the 3D lab at University of Michigan and meet with the staff there. I jumped at the chance to experience their Virtual Reality “Cave” and get immersed in a spooky wooden room with a stairway in the corner. Stereo images project on 3 walls and the floor are combined with polarized glasses to give me a very realistic experience. Calibrated position trackers attached to the glasses I was wearing were used to change the perspective of the projections as I moved around so the system responded to my movements and where I was directing my gaze as I moved around the room.

This first shot shows the stairs with the lights off. It is a bit blurred as my camera obviously couldn’t pick up the stereo images properly.

This second shot is with the lights on and the stairs have almost disappeared from sight.

The whole experience was very realistic and I became fully immersed in the room as I moved things around and also knocking a few things over. Climbing the stairs was okay on the way up, but on the way down it got interesting. Towards the bottom I peered over the broken hand rail and sized up a jump to the floor. It was only a small drop but as I tried to move, my legs froze. Part of my brain seemed to be telling me that I was already on the ground yet it didn’t certainly didn’t look like it!

As a highly visual thinker I can sometimes struggle to verbally articulate some of my more abstract (eccentric?) ideas. I would much prefer a diagram any day. However, today I added a new word to my vocabulary

Propinquity

It refers to nearness or proximity and embodies the likelihood of some form of interaction occurring. It would generally be used to refer to physical or psychological nearness. Interestingly it was way back in 1977 that Felipe Korzenny proposed a Theory of Electronic Propinquity just as electronic forms of communication were beginning to become more commonplace. I guess the author would never have envisaged the communication revolution that occurred some 25 years later with the advent of social media (i.e. Web 2.0) technologies.

So no matter where you are on the planet, if you have an internet connection, you can experience electronic propinquity. Over the next week or so I will be covering the Games for Health Conference 2009 (11-12th June, Baltimore, US) using a variety of social media tools and hope to provide an interactive and engaging experience. I am not alone in this venture having been drafted into a team put together by a good colleague of mine Biray Alsac.

 
Biray and her uber-geeky, super-awesome, digitally-healthy, fun-and-fit exergaming colleagues get together to share their collective experiences and thoughts from the Games for Health Conference 2009 via text, photos, podcasts, videos and more!

See what all the fuss is about (i.e. utilize Electronic Propinquity) here at: http://befitwithbiray.com/games4health/

Early last month I was passing close to the location of Distance Lab in the north-east of Scotland and was able to take up an outstanding invitation. The lab has arisen phoenix like from the ashes of a previous MIT Europe Lab venture in Dublin. They have a wide and varied selection of projects in development with a focus on overcoming barriers of distance, particular in remote areas.

The have a novel ExerGame called “Remote Impact” that they have developed that enables players to “box at a distance” except that it is in fact a carefully concealed mattress that you get stuck into. Your opponents image is projected onto the screen and you have to duck and dive at the same time as trying to score hits.

Quite a large set-up that needs a good bit of space.

Great fun and has tremendous potential as a platform to develop a new genre of games.

Looks like I am going to need some more practice….

Thanks to everybody at Distance Lab for being so welcoming and I will be keeping a close eye on future project developments.

Please note that no humans were harmed in the making of this post.

Last week was pretty hectic and it didn’t help that I was recovering from having run a 1/2 marathon (more about that soon). Anyway, I mustered the energy to get my presentation ready for a workshop on Social Media and Health at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (F.A.C.T.) in Liverpool, England. The sessions today were are interesting mix of theory and practice around the use of social media in arts engagement and participation. Many of the issues raised about the use of social media are similar to those concerning its use in the spheres of both health and education. There was a real sense that social media is seen by arts organizations as a way to reach out and engage with their audiences. I was struck by the thought that the perhaps relative size of the organizations operating in the arts field means that they are better placed to capitalize on the opportunities that social media affords. They are not too big and bureaucratic that it takes forever to do something, nor are they too small that they cannot sustain their efforts. I am very much looking forward to a full day of sessions tomorrow where the focus shifts to the use of social media to promote health.

Mobile ExerGame Tourality featured this evening on a prime time TV Gadget show. There are four different game modes and games are created online via a Google Maps based application and then uploaded to the community server for play. Using a location aware phone specific coordinates are “captured” and points accumulated. A mobile data connection is used to update players in realtime.

January is not quite at an end and already one of my predictions for 2009 has come to fruition!

I have just finished rather an intense period of grant proposal writing. Phew! In making the case for support, one of the issues that arose was the impact that it would have on Health Promotion research and practice. In essence the proposal was about developing a new model of health behavior that would lead to forms of health promotion intervention supported by mobile technology. The best acronym that I could come up with was a “C.A.T.” – Clever Application of Technology.
Now CATs come in all different shapes and sizes, some are domesticated and others are in the wild, but just how many Health Promotion CATs have you spotted? Okay, an informative and resourceful web presence is a good use of technology, but it is pretty much standard practice now. So I don’t think it would really count as a CAT.
I had a hunch that there are really not that many Health Promotion CATs out there so I decided to try and track some down. Once I finally managed to get hold of an electronic copy of the conference program form last year’s International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity’s (ISBNPA) annual conference, I got out my virtual binoculars and searched for anything to do with “technology”.
Sightings were scarce to say the least and I only managed to spot 5 CATs in the whole program of over 300 different research presentations! The thing is, 4 of them (of which one was my own CAT) constituted the symposium “Active Computer Games as a Tool to Promote Physical Activity Among Children”. The other remaining CAT that I caught sight of was on the use of GPS to map physical activity patterns in a rural New Zealand community.
So there you have it, only 5 CATs were spotted at last year’s ISBNPA conference and 4 of them were about ExerGaming! Whether you think of it as 4 out of 5 or 8 out of 10, it was a strong showing for ExerGaming CATs. But more significantly, if this is a barometer of the Health Promotion CAT population in general, it indicates that for the time being at least, they are still pretty rare creatures.

If you are counting down to midnight or wondering why you woke up a 1 second early today (presuming that you are reading this tomorrow), a “leap second” will be/has been added at 00:00 GMT. This is because the Earth’s spin is slowing down and therefore our clocks need to be adjusted to keep them in sync with the Earth’s rotation. You can read more about this problem and how you can help to keep the planet SPINNING in a previous post.

Last night I experienced my first “ExerGame Party” when I finally managed to get some thirty-something friends together with a selection of ExerGames. Obviously there is a great social aspect to ExerGames, but it is not something I have yet researched as it is hard to control in an experimental situation. Anyway, last night was a great fun and a very enjoyable experience. We tended to play more balance, skill and coordination games rather than out and out aerobic ones, although there were a few intense boxing matches! Having a random shuffle of music playing the background added interest with the lyrics of “I’m Still Standing” by Elton John being suitably apt for a particularly fast and furious segment of game play. On balance I reckon slightly more calories were consumed than expended. However at the end of the night there was a definite sense of euphoria (a.k.a “Feel Better Effect”).

Since it is almost holiday time, here is an interesting seasonal story. It follows on nicely from my Definition of ExerGaming Part 1. In order to both enhance their green credentials and save money, children at a school in the south of Scotland are using pedal power to light up their school’s Christmas tree. The aim of the “game” therefore is to try and keep the lights shining by taking it in turns to sit on the exercise bike and pedal. The teacher behind it all built a project around it and the pupils learnt about the physics of electricity generation, the efficiency and cost of production (mathematics) and also the reduced environmental impact (ecology). You can read the story and watch a video clip here.
It is just a pity that the pupils didn’t also learn about the expending of calories in humans and the health benefits of regular exercise. So what about a self (human) powered ExerGame?