Getting our youngsters to move more is a major mission for most countries. Mexian Industrial designer Isabel Rico Avila (btw - I love www.Coroflot.com for inspirational designers) shows off her Mantis bike concept by positioning the rider in a forward leaning position while the hands control a two-wheeled front steering mechanism. Given the skyrocketing rates of youth overweight and sedentarism, we need to find new activities and solutions that are enjoyable and can be supported in multiple environments. Let's get a Gamercize unit on this baby and now we have a whole new way to play whatever game we want. Time for a little praying mantis action;)
Unveiled at CES 2010, the Samsung MyFit is a fitness oriented MP3 player with a few extra goodies to keep you moving and motivated. From the video and specs, it looks like it uses BIA (Bio-electrical impedance) to measure the your body-fat percent using a three site measurement protocol (much better than the cold metal calipers in our lab). It will also help manage...
stress etc. with the help of accelerometer, fat and stress sensors. It also comes with two additional applications like water intake manager and smoking cessation utility.[Samsung Hub]
Will it have prompts and programming to engage in exergames or active games? We'll see.
The uber-connected and original Floyd Mueller) has done it again. After going to China to work on some developments with Microsoft's ( perhaps Project Natal), we find this video of Dance at a Distance, which to me should be named "Body Beats at a Distance".
From this workshop, it appears they mapped EMG of player 1 to a matched player 2's EMG so that the electrical signals are transferred from player to player. This is more reminiscent of my fathers TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) acupuncture machines than dancing - but call me crazy.
This is a super-early prototype of an Exertion Game that came out of a workshop on Designing Exertion Games. The idea participants came up with was that distributed players can see each other over a videoconference, and, according to music, have to slap-dance to it in sync: to facilitate synchronicity, players get an electric muscle stimulation on the same body limb where the other player is hitting his/her body. This video shows a 1-way interaction how the technology could look like: a hit on one body sends an electronic shock to the other body.
Here's are some really innovative final concepts developed by Flo's students in his Exertion Games lecture last fall. Perhaps we will see one of these games developed in the near future.
Besides ITV, 3D TV, and e-readers, news of Project Natal has been spreading all week at CES 2010 and its "scheduled" 2010 Holiday release:
Some of the news is good
A few details about Project Natal's technical capabilities slipped out alongside the holiday 2010 release window at Microsoft's CES press conference. The most revealing of these specifics is that the hardware will only siphon 10 to 15 percent of the 360's CPU power, according to a statementfrom Natal lead developer Alex Kipman. "Natal has to work on the existing hardware without taking too much hardware processing away from the games developers," Kipman added.
However, according to a report obtained by GamesIndustry, the processing power could have been further reduced. The original build for Natal included a chip that processed the "bone system," assumed responsible for creating a skeleton of the player in front of the device's glossy eye. However, in an attempt to lower costs, the chip was removed from the device's final build, putting that processing onus on the software that will utilize Natal.
In other words, it's extremely unlikely that any software will be able to have Natal support patched into it -- a fact that Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter says could help "serve to focus developers on Natal-specific concepts as opposed to revisiting old classics."[Via Joystiq]
...and some of the news is not being so well-received...
If it is going to revolutionize how we interact with media, data, and games - and help get us up off the couches and move more....I'm all for it. Let's go!
The ExerGame Lab wishes everyone a Happy New Year and hopes that 2010 brings everyone a Monstrous year filled with hope, happiness, and health to you and your families.
Let's keep our collaborative efforts like The ExerGaming Network (TEN) and Games for Health 2010 going strong and make 2010 bigger and better than ever before. ExerGamers will be presenting at numerous conferences over 2010 (G4H, AAHPERD, GDC, APA, ACSM, CHI-SIG, and more) so be sure to update me on where you're presenting and we can support the Twitter back-channels by using the #exergame or #exergaming hastags on Twitter or folllow me at syangman or ExerGame Network.
An early Christmas present came to me this afternoon. After writing about wanting to see the newer gDitty prototypes, Maurina Venturelli, Web Communications and Social Media Consultant tweeted the Flickr set you see above. It looks like they posted the album today! Now that's what I call a responsive Web 2.0 / Social Networking team. In the pictures you see some pre-product shots and designs as well as what appears to be family focus groups and even some storyboarding / brainstorming sessions.
There is an intriguing shot of what appears to be simple push-activated lights on the floor. I'm trying to figure out why they would do this activity and it also reminds me of a toy by Wild Planet called Hyper Dash. Using RFID tags in numbered mini- pucks, the object is to hit the correctly called number or color in the least amount of time possible. I was contacted by Dan Botnick and he was generous enough to send out some Hyper Dash, Hyper Jump and Animal Scramble for me to try out in the lab and with my students. Amazingly, college-aged students loved it as much as the children we work with.
Thanks again to @HopeLab for rolling out these photos and I look forward to seeing any more peaks into the R&D of gDitty. Happy Holidays!
