Customization of Virtual Coaches
Individual Coach Creation
Project Team
|
Supervision
|
Goal
Welcome! Your individual fitness program starts here!
In this year's internship, it was our task to develop a customizable fitness coach as a virtual agent. Our group chose to build the beginning of the fitness program.
We wanted to develop a prototype in which the users can build up their very own individual fitness coach. Our goal was not only to implement the customization of the coach’s appearance, but also to include different coaching styles and training settings that the users can choose from. This enables the perfect training conditions customized to the users’ personal needs.
The training begins with us and our goal was to set the base for a good user experience.
Approach
Because we think that the way in which the coach interacts with the user is crucial for the overall user experience, we set our focus on developing four coaching types to integrate into our application. We chose to offer (1) a calm, (2) a cheerful, (3) a challenging and (4) a challenging but cheerful coach. This should cover a good proportion of the users’ needs. For the training settings we decided to only consider the basic structure of the training. Beyond that we determined that our customization settings should include the coach’s appearance and clothing options as well as basic background settings. We want our users to feel comfortable. For this reason we chose to use calm colors in our interface and chose blue as our main color.
For the implementation we used Unity 3D in which we created the interactive interface. We built the coach avatars in Character Creator and used mixamo for animations.
Outcome and Outlook
Our finished application contains 5 setting-panels for the customization of the coach’s body, clothing, coach type, training conditions and the background settings, which are navigated through the accompanying tabs on the left. Next to the panels we placed the avatar, which adapts to the users’ settings simultaneously.
In the Body-Panel the user can set the gender, age, skin color and hair color of the coach. The Clothing-Panel offers the customization of the avatar’s shirt and pants. Because our main focus was the implementation of the 4 coach types we put a lot of emphasis on the different characteristics of each type. In the Coach Type-Panel we gave each coach type a name and included the most important characteristics of the coach. That way the user gets good overview of all coach types before clicking on anyone. The Training-Panel includes the configuration of the training duration and number of breaks and in the Background-Panel the user can change the wall and floor color.
Overall we kept the scope of our settings relatively small and focussed on the, in our opinion, most important ones. This could be extended in the future, so that the users have a bigger degree of freedom for the customization of their coach. Moreover the application is not suitable for visually impaired users. For this, a language assistant needs to be implemented as well.