Remote Impact - Shadowboxing over a Distance
NEWS: Shortlisted for the European Innovative Games Award 2008 (together with Nintendo's Wii Fit): http://www.hessen-it.eu/mm/EIGA_20-10-08_E.pdf
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., Gibbs, M. R., and Vetere, F. 2008. Remote Impact: Shadowboxing over a Distance. In CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2291-2296. (PDF)
Mueller, F., Agamanolis, S., Vetere, F. and Gibbs, M.R Brute Force as Input for Networked Gaming, Proceedings of OzCHI 2007 Australasian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, Adelaide, Australia, 28 - 30 November 2007, ACM, New York, NY, USA. (PDF)
Mueller, F., Vetere, F. and Gibbs, M.R. Taxonomy of Exertion Games, Proceedings of OzCHI 2008 Australasian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, Australia, ACM, New York, NY, USA. (PDF)
Info
More info: 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
Director Magazine: http://www.director.co.uk/ONLINE/nesta_21_05.html
Shortlisted for the European Innovative Games Award 2008 (together with Nintendo's Wii Fit): http://www.hessen-it.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).