Sports over a distance

ABSTRACT

Computer games lack the social bonding and collective physical exercise benefits that sports provide. To overcome these limitations, we have been investigating how to apply the benefits of sport, in particular the workout and social bonding effect, in a distributed setting. We designed, developed, and evaluated Breakout for Two, which allows people who are miles apart to play a physically exhausting ball game together. We had over a thousand players who interacted through a life-size video-conference screen using a regular soccer ball as an input device. In an evaluative study, 56 players were interviewed and said that they got to know the other player better, had more fun, became better friends, and were happier with the transmitted audio and video quality in comparison to those who played the same game using a nonexertion keyboard interface. These results suggest that sports over a distance is an exciting new field with an "exertion interface" that encourages remote interaction, where players can achieve both a work-out and socializing.

REFERENCES

• 1: Brucker-Cohen, J. and Huang, S. 2005. NetGym. http://fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~jonah/middle images/work/expertext.html
• 2: Marleen Huysman , Volker Wulf, Social Capital and Information Technology, The MIT Press, 2004
• 3: KiRo. 2005. The table soccer robot. http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~kiro/english/index.html.
• 4: Konami Of America. 2005. Dance dance revolution. http://www.konami.com/main/games/dance/.
• 5: Sari Mokka , Antti Väätänen , Juhani Heinilä , Pasi Välkkynen, Fitness computer game with a bodily user interface, Proceedings of the second international conference on Entertainment computing, p.1-3, May 08-10, 2003, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• 6: Mueller, F., Agamanolis, S., and Picard, R. 2002. Exertion interfaces for sports over a distance. In Proceedings of the Conference on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST, 2002). ACM Press, New York.
• 7: Florian Mueller , Stefan Agamanolis , Rosalind Picard, Exertion interfaces: sports over a distance for social bonding and fun, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642709]
• 8: New York Hall Of Science. 2005. Press room. http://nyhallsci.org/nyhs-pressroom/nyhs-pressreleases/prtug_of_war.html.
• 9: Toshikazu Ohshima , Kiyohide Satoh , Hiroyuke Yamamoto , Hideyuki Tamura, AR² Hockey, ACM SIGGRAPH 98 Conference abstracts and applications, p.110, July 19-24, 1998, Orlando, Florida, United States [doi>10.1145/280953.281302]
• 10: Eugene F. Provenzo, Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991
• 11: Putnam, R. 2000. Bowling Alone. Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, New York. 2000.
• 12: pLAB-Snowwars. 2005. http://plab.ramk.fi/projektit/snow.htm
• 13: Telephonic Arm Wrestling. 2005. http://www.normill.com/artpage.html.
• 14: Wulf, V., Moritz, E. F., Henneke, C., Al-zubaidi, K., and Stevens, G. 2004. Computer supported collaborative sports: Creating social spaces filled with sports activities. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Educational Computing (ICEC 2004). LNCS, Springer, 2004. 80-89.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Input devices and strategies (e.g., mouse, touchscreen)

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
computer-mediated communication, exertion interface, funology, physical interface, social bonding, sport, video-conferencing