Application of serious games to sport, health and exercise

Use of interactive entertainment has been exponentially expanded since the last decade. Throughout this 10+ year evolution there has been a concern about turning entertainment properties into serious applications, a.k.a "Serious Games". In this article we present two set of Serious Game applications, an Environment Visualising game which focuses solely on applying serious games to elite Olympic sport and another set of serious games that incorporate an in house developed proprietary input system that can detect most of the human movements which focuses on applying serious games to health and exercise

Accessibility of 3D Game Environments for People with Aphasia: An Exploratory Study

People with aphasia experience difficulties with all aspects of language and this can mean that their access to technology is substantially reduced. We report a study undertaken to investigate the issues that confront people with aphasia when interacting with technology, specifically 3D game environments. Five people with aphasia were observed and interviewed in twelve workshop sessions. We report the key themes that emerged from the study, such as the importance of direct mappings between users’ interactions and actions in a virtual environment. The results of the study provide some insight into the challenges, but also the opportunities, these mainstream technologies offer to people with aphasia. We discuss how these technologies could be more supportive and inclusive for people with language and communication difficulties

Using Virtual Reality to increase technical performance during rowing workouts

Technology is advancing rapidly in virtual reality (VR) and sensors, gathering feedback from our body and the environment we are interacting in. Combining the two technologies gives us the opportunity to create personalized and reactive immersive environments. These environments can be used e.g. for training in dangerous situations (e.g. fire, crashes, etc), or to improve skills with less distraction than regular natural environments would have. The pilot study described in this thesis puts an athlete who is rowing on a stationary rowing machine into a virtual environment. The VR takes movement from several sensors of the ergo-meter and displays those in VR. In addition, metrics on technique are being derived from the sensor data and physiological data. All this is used to investigate if, and to which extent, VR may improve the technical skills of the athlete during the complex sport of rowing. Furthermore, athletes are giving subjective feedback about their experience comparing a standard rowing workout, with the workout using VR. First results indicate better performance and an enhanced experience by the athlete

Activity-promoting gaming systems in exercise and rehabilitation

Commercial activity-promoting gaming systems provide a potentially attractive means to facilitate exercise and rehabilitation. The Nintendo Wii, Sony EyeToy, Dance Dance Revolution, and Xbox Kinect are examples of gaming systems that use the movement of the player to control gameplay. Activity-promoting gaming systems can be used as a tool to increase activity levels in otherwise sedentary gamers and also be an effective tool to aid rehabilitation in clinical settings. Therefore, the aim of this current work is to review the growing area of activity-promoting gaming in the context of exercise, injury, and rehabilitation

Indoor Activity Detection and Recognition for Sport Games Analysis

Activity recognition in sport is an attractive field for computer vision research. Game, player and team analysis are of great interest and research topics within this field emerge with the goal of automated analysis. The very specific underlying rules of sports can be used as prior knowledge for the recognition task and present a constrained environment for evaluation. This paper describes recognition of single player activities in sport with special emphasis on volleyball. Starting from a per-frame player-centered activity recognition, we incorporate geometry and contextual information via an activity context descriptor that collects information about all player's activities over a certain timespan relative to the investigated player. The benefit of this context information on single player activity recognition is evaluated on our new real-life dataset presenting a total amount of almost 36k annotated frames containing 7 activity classes within 6 videos of professional volleyball games. Our incorporation of the contextual information improves the average player-centered classification performance of 77.56% by up to 18.35% on specific classes, proving that spatio-temporal context is an important clue for activity recognition.Comment: Part of the OAGM 2014 proceedings (arXiv:1404.3538

Full-body motion-based game interaction for older adults

Older adults in nursing homes often lead sedentary lifestyles, which reduces their life expectancy. Full-body motion-control games provide an opportunity for these adults to remain active and engaged; these games are not designed with age-related impairments in mind, which prevents the games from being leveraged to increase the activity levels of older adults. In this paper, we present two studies aimed at developing game design guidelines for full-body motion controls for older adults experiencing age-related changes and impairments. Our studies also demonstrate how full-body motion-control games can accommodate a variety of user abilities, have a positive effect on mood and, by extension, the emotional well-being of older adults. Based on our studies, we present seven guidelines for the design of full-body interaction in games. The guidelines are designed to foster safe physical activity among older adults, thereby increasing their quality of life. Copyright 2012 ACM