Remote Impact

Remote Impact is a "Sports over a Distance" game that provides 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 recognizes 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 socialize and create new friendships over a distance in an entertaining sportive way.

Current widespread telecommunication technologies can support generic messaging and business-oriented tasks, but they do not adequately support opportunities for building a trust relationship between distant colleagues. 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 recognizes 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.

Acknowledgements

Remote Impact - Shadowboxing over a Distance was built at Distance Lab by Florian 'Floyd' Mueller and Stefan Agamanolis. The version at CHI'08 was built by Matthew Karau, Costas Bissas, Cindy Jeffers and Stefan Agamanolis. Special thanks to Martin R. Gibbs and Frank Vetere, University of Melbourne. The animation in the video thanks to Stefan Greuter.

Publications

Mueller, F. & Agamanolis, S. (2009) Interaction Design in Sports. In Design for Sport book. To appear 2009.

 Mueller, F., Agamanolis, S., Vetere, F. & Gibbs, M. R. (2009) Brute force interactions: leveraging intense physical actions in gaming. Proceedings of the 21th Australasian conference on Computer-Human Interaction. Melbourne, Australia, ACM. OzCHI 2009 (tier 2)  

Mueller, F, Agamanolis, S, Gibbs, M & Vetere, F (2009) Remote Impact: Shadowboxing over a Distance. CHI'09: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts. Boston, MA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3531-3532.

Mueller, F, Agamanolis, S, Gibbs, M & Vetere, F (2009) Brute Force Interface: Leveraging Intense Physical Exertion in Whole Body Interactions. Workshop on Whole-Body Interactions. CHI'09: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts. Boston, MA, USA. http://lister.cms.livjm.ac.uk/homepage/staff/cmsdengl/WBI2009

Mueller, F., Agamanolis, S., Vetere, F. & Gibbs, M. R. (2008) Remote Impact: Shadowboxing over a Distance. ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 posters. Los Angeles, California, ACM. Siggraph ‘08 (tier 1+)

Mueller, F., Agamanolis, S., Gibbs, M. & Vetere, F. (2008) Remote Impact: Shadowboxing over a Distance. CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. Florence, Italy, ACM. CHI 2008 (tier 1+)

Mueller, F., Agamanolis, S., Vetere, F. & Gibbs, M. R. (2007) Brute force as input for networked gaming. Proceedings of the 19th Australasian conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Entertaining User Interfaces. Adelaide, Australia, ACM. OzCHI 2007 (tier 2)

Distance Lab

There is also a webpage at: http://www.distancelab.org/projects/remoteimpact/

In the Press

BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/7268550.stm

BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/7423140.stm

Shortlisted for the European Innovative Games Award 2008 (together with Nintendo's Wii Fit): http://innovative-games.eu/mm/EIGA_20-10-08_E.pdf

Video

The video from above is also available online at YouTube and to download (right-click, save as) in Quicktime format (60 MB), MPEG2 format (60 MB) and iPod format (20 MB).