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Remote Impact
Boxing over a Distance
Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Matthew Karau, Costas Bissas, Cindy Jeffers, Elena Corchero, Richard Wilson, Andrea Taylor, Stefan Agamanolis
Remote Impact is a "Sports over a Distance"
game that enables a full body contact experience between
geographically distant players. The game encourages extreme physical
exertion and, unlike the Nintendo Wii and other console games, it
recognises and registers intense brute force. The physical intensity
of the game contributes to general fitness, weight loss and stress
relief at the same time it allows you to socialise and create new
friendships over a distance in a fun way.
Current widespread communication technologies can support generic
messaging and business-oriented tasks, but they do not adequately
facilitate the building of trust between distance persons. On the
other hand, traditional contact sports like football, rugby, and
martial arts are well known for their effectiveness in social bonding
and teambuilding. Remote Impact aims to provide these benefits to
participants who are in different places.
A life-sized silhouette of the remote participant is projected on
the interface, which resembles a mattress standing against a wall. A
unique sensing system measures the location and intensity of each
impact. Players can punch, kick, or throw their entire bodies against
their projected opponent, and the system recognises when there has
been a hit or a miss. Players can dodge hits by ducking or moving out
of the way, just as in real sports. More points are scored by hitting
your opponent harder. At the end of a specific time interval, the
player with the most points wins. Players can also talk to and hear
each other through a voice connection between the locations.
Uses
Remote Impact could allow friends and family members who live apart
to engage in a full-body exertion exercise experience together in a
playful environment without anybody getting hurt.
Schools could install Remote Impact to allow students to
participate in sports and exercise together with students in other
schools, possibly very far away.
Teambuilding coaches could use Remote Impact to increase the
effectiveness of teams that work across continents.
Event companies or networking organisations could use the
system to break the ice between remote participants and build a sense
of togetherness.
Health club companies with multiple locations could offer
dedicated installations to allow members to work out with their
distributed friends in connected gyms.
Commercialisation
We are now commercialising this concept. We can build custom
installations to suit individual requirements. Contact us for more
information on hiring or purchase opportunities or if you are
interested in supporting the development of products like this.
Publications
Florian Mueller, Stefan Agamanolis, Martin Gibbs, and Frank
Vetere, Remote Impact - Shaadowboxing over a Distance,
Proceedings of CHI 2008 Conference OzCHI 2007 Australasian
Computer-Human Interaction Conference, Florence, Italy, 5 - 10
April 2008, ACM Digital Library. (PDF)
Florian Mueller, Stefan Agamanolis, Frank Vetere, and Martin
Gibbs, Brute Force as Input for Networked Gaming, CHI 2008
Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
Adelaide, Australia, 28 - 30 November 2007, ACM Digital Library. (PDF)
Video
Watch a video about Remote Impact: Windows Media Video
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