Evercycle - A Virtual Reality Exercise Game to Accelerate Exercise Performance Improvement using the Feedforward Effect

Alex Whalley

OAI: oai:purehost.bath.ac.uk:publications/e0058d3d-2e10-4fb3-b389-e4fb07f7a23a

National obesity levels are rising, and sedentary lifestyles are becoming more common in industrialized nations. Individuals within this category fnd maintaining and improving atexercise difficult, and feel a lack of motivation to continue exercising.Gamifcation has been shown to be an effective way of helping users improve in a variety of tasks including exercise. We identify the key motivators and skills that help users improveat exercise, and find corresponding gamifcation techniques to keep users motivated and accelerate the rate at which users improve at exercise. Similarly we consider the barriers to traditional exercise and how we can avoid them in a virtual reality exercise game.We identify \ghost" recordings as a widely utilised way of gamifying self-competition, a key factor in helping users improve. We investigate not only the established effectiveness of ghosts with regards to user performance and immersion/enjoyment, but also identify the potential to extend the effectiveness of ghost implementations by utilizing the psychological"Feedforward Effect".We proceed to investigate design considerations based on previous virtual reality exercisegame implementations and related literature. We use this to design our own exercise game that meets the needs of people who struggle to maintain/improve at exercise.We implement our own virtual reality exercise game using appropriate exercise and virtual reality hardware. Utilizing this game, we conduct an empirical study to determine whetheror not the feedforward effect can signifcantly contribute to accelerating the rate at which users improve at exercise, without negatively impacting the user experience.

/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/good_health_and_well_being name=SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being