An Embodied User Interface for Increasing Physical Activities in Game

Abstract

The rate of obese has been increasing and obesity has emerged as a significant threat not only to the health but also in society. Obesity has adverse effects such as physical appearance, psychosocial consequences and metabolic disturbances. One of reasons causing these phenomena is most games have static and stationary user interfaces as input devices. These kinds of interfaces hold users at their computers and cause not only decreases of the strength of their health, but also blocks communications between family members. In this paper, we propose physical activity based interactive exercise called Punch Punch, which is played with virtual objects displaying on a large screen. The informal study revealed that the Punch Punch enhanced physical and social activities while playing games. The goal of this study is finding embodied user interfaces to increase physical and social activities.