224. Movement-based Games, Sports, and Coaching

説明

Mixed Reality (MR) technologies are increasingly being used to enrich exhibitions and public spaces by blending digital content with the physical environment in real time. However, little is known about curatorial strategies for embedding MR exhibitions into public spaces or promoting audience experiences. To explore this, we designed and curated a campus-based MR art exhibition, using contextualism as the fundamental concept. We conducted an interdisciplinary expert focus group alongside exhibition viewing to identify opportunities, challenges, and design strategies from multiple perspectives. In parallel, we conducted user studies with general audiences to examine how curatorial strategies foster experiential qualities. Our findings reveal insights from both experts and general users, along with strategies in curating MR exhibitions, and highlight the foundational role of contextualism in curating MR art exhibitions in urban public spaces.

日本語まとめ

説明

Urban cycling benefits personal wellbeing, public health, and global sustainability. While current tools such as Google and Apple Maps provide bike route recommendations, they do not account for a person’s dynamic context (e.g., commuting, recreation). We introduce BikeButler, a personalized, context-sensitive bicycle route generation tool that enables users to generate, compare, virtually preview, and iteratively customize bike routes via custom profiles that encode seven bikeability features, including bike lane existence, slope, vegetation, and surface quality—fusing data from OpenStreetMap, open government data, and a custom VLM-based analysis of Street View images. To design BikeButler, we employed a human-centered, iterative approach starting with formative interviews and culminating in a user study (N=16). Our findings demonstrate that bike routing preferences change as a function of context, that BikeButler enables users to quickly create and iterate context-sensitive routes, and that generated routes differ significantly from Google Maps bike routing, reinforcing the importance of personalization.

日本語まとめ

説明

Exergames combine motivating game elements with bodily movement to encourage physical activity. However, onboarding players to perform correct movements remains a challenge, especially in virtual reality (VR) environments where safety and performance are critical. Drawing inspiration from sports training and learning sciences, we contrast two onboarding approaches: (i) trial-and-error and (ii) observational learning via a novel self-model tutorial. In this tutorial, players temporarily lose agency and observe their own avatar performing the movements, leveraging VR’s unique affordances for embodied experiences. To explore which of these two approaches yields a better performance and player experience, we conducted a between-participants study (N=60), comparing them against a baseline condition without a tutorial. Our findings show that the self-model tutorial not only improves players' performance but also increases the perceived ease of control and progress feedback. We discuss tradeoffs and implications for the design of future onboarding experiences in VR exergames.

日本語まとめ

説明

Current co-op games keep collaboration virtual even when players are physically co-located in the same room, limiting embodied coordination in the shared space. We introduce MoveTogether, a novel physical co-op gameplay in which two players jointly operate a single, tracked prop, adding a shared physical communication channel on top of visual and audio cues.

To explore the design space in mixed reality, we conducted a workshop with 10 professional designers, generating a physical co-op design space that encompasses prop and interaction design patterns, and how they relate to affordance and cooperative experience.

In a within-subjects study of virtual vs. physical co-op experiences (n=16), we observed finer-grained task coordination, fewer collisions, and more strategy-focused communication. Players reported higher collaboration, sense of achievement, enjoyment, and overall preference for physical co-op. This work opens a new design space for co-located play and offers guidance for designing embodied co-op experiences.

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説明

The rise in popularity and value of esports motivates the creation of computational training tools (CTTs) for learning, assessment, and skill gain. While some tools exist commercially, much of the work in the research literature is rarely used outside of a lab, resulting in a lack of knowledge on the challenges involved in real-world integration. In this work, we develop a bespoke CTT for League of Legends, MySkills, based on prior work and deploy it at a professional training academy for three months. Based on two rounds of stakeholder interviews, we uncover insights into users' perspectives on using CTTs in esports coaching and the challenges inherent in introducing a novel tool into an existing, real-world esports training context. From these results, we connect the domain of esports training technology to existing conversations on translational HCI, challenges in bridging research and practice, and present implications for future work.

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説明

Exergames promise enjoyable physical activity through gameplay, yet players often face barriers that undermine engagement, safety, and retention. To date, knowledge about which barriers are encountered by end-users of commercial exergames and which mitigation strategies are used is limited. To address this gap, we conducted an online survey with 174 participants and provide a comprehensive organization of 60 reported barriers across six categories: physical, mental, social, environmental, technological, and game design. Key barriers include space limitations, social discomfort, addictive gameplay, and injuries. Our analysis reveals that while players try to mitigate barriers through ad-hoc strategies, issues like embarrassment, addiction, and harassment remain difficult to overcome. These findings highlight the need for more adaptive game designs, including dynamic spatial adjustments, personalized pacing mechanisms, and supportive social features. This work advances the understanding of exergame barriers and their impact and offers actionable insights for designing more inclusive and resilient movement-based games.

日本語まとめ

説明

Athletes of all levels can find drills repetitive, tedious, and unengaging. Sport training games address this, aiming to make practicing techniques fun. However, there is little information about what feedback athletes need to support skill acquisition and improve engagement. To address this, we develop a game for training the optimal shooting arc technique for basketball free throws, and compare several scoring mechanics based on: 1) adherence to technique, 2) results (successfully making a shot), and 3) a combination of technique and results feedback. We find that technique feedback is essential to adopting a new technique, while results feedback improves engagement. We also find that combining technique and results feedback is effective, but can be overly complex for novices. Our results allow us to make recommendations to designers and researchers on how they can effectively scaffold skill development and engagement in sport training games.

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