Leveraging Virtual Reality and Exergames to Promote Physical Activity

Abstract

This work introduces a Virtual Reality Exergame application to promote physical activity. With obesity on the rise, it is more important than ever to encourage and motivate people to be active. Exercise helps with the expenditure of energy via body movements, which is key to living a healthy life. However, exercise by itself is not an engaging activity for most people. The objective of the exergame introduced in this work is to encourage users to perform full-body movements to pass through a series of obstacles and achieve higher scores, unlock content, and complete a series of achievements. The application implements a variety of game elements to help motivate users to play the game and perform physical activity. Each of the game elements can be toggled on or off depending on whether the player feels they are benefitting or hindering the experience. This feature allows users to customize the application. Moreover, this exergame application leverages Virtual Reality and Depth-sensor technology to help provide users with an immersive first-person experience. While in the game, users can visualize their motions. This is because the users can control their virtual avatar with their body movements with the use of the depth-sensor. It is expected that this immersivity will motivate and encourage the users even more. The objective of this work is to introduce this Virtual Reality Exergame application as well as the hardware and software development aspects of it.