Just back from a great holiday in the Black Forest, Germany, which revolved round a family wedding. It is a beautiful landscape with an abundance of trees – so lots of things made of wood about the place. Despite getting away from it all, I managed to fit in some “Eco ExerGaming”…
The dice shown in the pictures below were knocking about a rink designed for French Boules judging by the detailed rules shown on a nearby sign. I had a go a “rolling” a few of the dice, one at a time as they were rather heavy, with a view to an ExerGame of Yahtzee. I soon realized that not only were they a bit on a heavy side, but there was also a design flaw (see if you can spot it in the photos)!
Opting for softwood rather than plastic construction might permit the use of the term “Eco”, but there is at present no sign of any “electronics” that would properly qualify it as an “ExerGame”! However, all is not lost as I had with me a book for holiday reading on how to put small micro-controllers into objects in order to “wire them up”.
So whilst this form of “Eco ExerGaming” is at the present stage a “concept project”, it could be a sign of things to come, so watch this space…
Analogue no more, the digital revolution is supposed to herald a new entertainment era with thousands of music tracks no more than a click away. At least that is what I thought until I heard Margaret Robertson’s very entertaining and informative presentation last Monday at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival. The subject matter was her 10 best games of the previous year, three of which happened to be mobile iPod games.
First up was the Nike+ iPod that becomes a coach, personal trainer and all round training companion. The shoe insert senses motion communicates the movement to your iPod which calculates workout data and can upload it to the web. Margaret was full of praise for the product and how it helps motivate her to exercise.
When I spoke to her afterwards, I said that I was heartened by her enthusiasm and whilst it wasn’t a game, it wasn’t that far removed from an “ExerGame”. She was quick to correct me that as far as she was concerned it was a game, but then I haven’t “played” it. But you will see from her article ”How gaming is running with sport“ that she considers the online challenge and leader board ranking to be a game/competition.
takes something I hate (running) and turns it into something I love (gaming)
Second up was “Song Summoner”, an iPod game that customizes the game play characters and their powers according to the tracks you listen to.
The final game was “Phase:” aka Guitar Hero meets iPod. Again the vital ingredient that affects game play are the tracks you listen to.
I think you can begin to see where this is heading…………..
Now here is the iPodder’s Dilemma: The choice of track critically affects the various game plays. So a particularly high scoring track might be one of the “cheesiest / heaviest / smouchiest / funkiest / grooveyist / uncoolest” (delete as appropriate) – or not as the case may be. Suddenly the choice of music itself becomes a game. So herein lies the dilemma. Coming soon to a gym near you…
Note: If you choose to exercise whilst using earphones to listen to music, please be aware of your surroundings.
I heard a short news item on the radio on the way home from work regarding a new edition of an english dictionary and the additional “new” words that were included in it. I went to the companion website but a search on “ExerGame” turned up a blank. I then tried an other dictionary site without success until I stumbled on this “Exergame – Word of the Week” 11 December 2007. I know I am a bit behind on this one, but I thought you might like to know that its official!
I have just been in a demonstration session of a couple of forthcoming Sony Playstation 2 EyeToy games. They use color tracking of real world objects to play the game. One is “Hero”, an adventure game which involves fighting with a green foam sword. The other is “Pom Pom Party” which requires you to wave pink and green pompoms around to play the game. Since nobody else in the audience wanted to have a go, I stepped up to the challenge. Following on from my ski-jumping exploits, I have now fulfilled another lifetime ambition…
Which came first the chicken or the egg? Or in the case of Warner Bros cartoons, the animation or the music? Following on from the silent movies of old, I would have said it was the action, but I would be wrong. In fact a lot of the music was written and performed by Raymond Scott in the 1930’s prior to it being used to accompany cartoons from the 1940s onwards. More recently Scott’s music has been painstaking transcribed by Stu Brown and others for the Raymond Scott Project and was performed a couple of nights ago at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival.
It was an electric performance, literally, as at one stage the percussionist Stu Brown was playing a piece using an some sort of oscillating synthesizer hooked up to a typewriter! Not only was the performance hand clapping and foot stomping inducing, the sheer energy of “Powerhouse” made me feel like getting out of my seat and running up and down.
On the way home from the gig I couldn’t help but wonder if those “Looney Tunes” were ultimately influential in video games. I’m no musicologist, but the soundtracks of games from the 80’s like “Maniac Miner” spring to mind. So if the right kind of music can have such a “Get up and Go” feel to it, what about an “ExerGame” based on a cartoon capers style chase sequence?
I have recently managed to get my hands on (and paid for) an iPhone. The user interface is a bit of a step change, but things are starting to fall into place. The fact that the phone incorporates motion sensors (accelerometers) and location awareness (assisted gps) should get you thinking as to new possibilities for “ExerGaming”.
Well, somewhat reluctantly, I have had a go at a virtual “axe throwing” game on the phone. It is rather like archery, except that instead of shooting arrows, the Viking character on the phone throws axes at targets in response to your arm motion. It is not like a Wiimote where you have a safety cord, so it wouldn’t do to let the phone slip…
…I can safely report you don’t just need to “throw” as hard as possible, but rather timing is everything. Still, I only managed to hit a couple of targets. If you do decide to try it for yourself, then you proceed very much at your own risk. In the interest of me getting a good night’s sleep, I will keep my conscience clear by exercising some caution and not making the url available here.
It certainly opens plenty of possibilities for a future branch “ExerGame” developments, where everybody has there own personal “interaction device”. Post me a comment with any thoughts or suggestions.
Last Friday evening I was able to round off my time in Vienna and take in a hardware exhibition and and a display of creative computer graphics on a big screen – so called “Demos”. The Demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in the production of Demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a Demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.
The hardware exhibition featured many different types of early home computers that I remember from the eighties and brought back a few memories. The graphics and the accompanying soundtracks produced on the assorted hardware were pretty amazing given the limited computing power available at the time.
The demos shown in the outdoor cinema were all amazing in their own right from the very recent all the back to the 1980’s – along with their “eighties sounding” music (hence the reference to Ultravox’s hit single “Vienna” in the post title).
Having not known anything about the “Demoscene” before, it was perhaps a fortunate oversight on my part as to the contextual meaning of “live” that caught my eye on the exhibition poster. In the context of “Demos” it means computed in “real time”, hence the challenge of pushing the hardware to the limits.
But in researching this post, I had a few thoughts and came across this video clip in the context of interactive video jockying (iVJing?) - (takes a minute to really get going). I am sure there is the potential for an ExerGame in there somewhere…..
I was at the seminar today focusing on embodied interaction and computational thinking. It was very much proof of concept research and in many ways the embodied interaction part was a way of trying to make learning about computing principles fun for children.
The prototype system basically consisted of a set of wearable 2D barcodes positioned at various sites on the body, a webcam and a wiimote. This allowed the user to interact with the interface on the screen and move around and have this captured by the system. The basic concept was that of a “magic mirror” where the user is “dressed up” on screen and can act out a story.
It looked great fun and just shows what you can do with a few cheap components. Not only was the talk interesting, it stimulated some lively discussion. I had already been thinking about the continuum between “embodied technology” and “a technologized body” but another dimension emerged, that is the balance between real and virtual objects. More specifically, I could imagine an “ExerGame” that involved more that just an exercise interface, but rather a mixture of real and virtual objects that needs physical effort to manipulate them in order to play the game.
This post is about embodied interaction. As a concept it starts out as way to describe controlling a computer using physical movement. Hey, I thought – is that not what “ExerGaming” is? Well, yes I suppose it is, and that is what excites me about the concept.
Embodied interaction is described in a book by Paul Dourish. In addition to the physical dimension, it also encompasses a social dimension e.g. the user’s experience. But more than that, it suggests something dynamic and the magic word “actor”.
Which gets me nicely on to a question that fascinates me? “Are (some) ExerGames performance art?” e.g. DDR.
Why am a blogging about this? Well there is a seminar at my institution next week on embodied interaction in the context of enabling children to program interactive adventure games using physical actions rather than having to abstract code. I shall be going along to see how the concept is developed in that field with a view to applying it to “ExerGames”.
In the process of spring cleaning my office I came across a long forgotten about running shoe box. Inside which was, wait for it…, the first computer I ever owned! An 8 bit, 48 K Oric Atmos.
It is hard to believe that it is 25 years old! The mobile phone in my pocket is considerably smaller, has much greater processing power and storage capacity, oh, and it can make phone calls!
Along with the computer were several games – a couple of “shoot ‘em up” space invader type games and an adventure game based on “The Hobbit”.
Looking back now it seems like something from a previous century.
