Project Team Anna Drewing Taisiya Lerman

Supervision Dr. Fariba Mostajeran Gourtani Celeste Mason Dr. Susanne Schmidt

Goal

Our goal was to use a gamification approach to help children and teenagers find a form of exercise they would enjoy to partake in.

Design

Our approach to the task at hand was to create a gamified experience for the user. We designed a 3D world with different environments representing each possible form of exercise from which the user could choose.
The user is represented through a fox avatar which he or she can move around the world. The fox avatar helps the user identify with the character regardless of the user's appearance. If the user had been represented by a humanoid character which was dissimilar to the user’s appearance, this could have had consequences on the user’s decision based on the appearance of the character. This is also suggested by the Proteus Effect which suggests that avatar characteristics influence the decision making of users in virtual environments (Praetorius et al. 2020).
The world we created has six different environments representing six different kinds of sports the user can choose from. To get to the final choice the user walks along paths to get to the final environments.
When the user encounters a crossroad where the path divides a translucent UI panel appears that gives instructions. The instructions describe in which case which path should be taken by the user. The first crossroad for instance lets the user choose whether he or she wants to exercise in or outdoors. According to these instructions the user proceeds to the next crossroad. The final environment is visually distinct by the fact that no further path leads away from it and a white square is present on the ground. When the user steps onto the white square a final UI panel appears which tells the user which sport he or she arrived at and the fox performs a somersault.
The final environments are a mountain range, a forest, a beach volleyball field, a soccer field, a gym and a dancing studio representing visually the possible sports the user can choose from.
The foxes ability to move freely around the world gives the possibility to explore the different choices and their consequences without committing to them. Additionally the user is able to reverse decisions taken prior. Compared to a conversational agent this is much simpler because the proceeding is intuitively clear. The user just walks back the route he or she already came and has no uncertainty whether the system will understand the intention behind that action. Additionally this will add to the feeling of agency and thereby to a bigger engagement when using the program.
The environmental change along the paths taken helps on one hand to symbolize the effect of the users decisions and on the other helps to seamlessly transition to a finite state. A background soundtrack is played during the runtime of the program to enhance the experience of positive emotions during its usage.
This whole setup helps especially children to stay focused longer. The gamification aspect helps them to stick through the process and finish the game, because it provides additional entertainment along the process of finding a suitable sport.

Limitations

The limitations of our project include that the path the user has to take is relatively long. A chatbot-experience might be quicker.
This way of presenting the sports to the user is also limited to visually presentable sports. That is also the reason for the fact that the choosing process is not very detailed or thorough. We are not able to ask the user questions about the duration or the intensity of the exercises and therefore are not able to accomodate people with disabilities for example. Finally, this method of choosing an exercise can be seen as too inefficient by adults and therefore be dismissed by them.

Conclusions

To conclude, we achieved a working game-like experience for the user, by which a sport can be chosen.
To improve on the foundation of our work, we could make the walking and running speed as well as the jump height adjustable in the game instead of in the unity inspector. Additionally, we could build on the work our peers have done in their projects and use a custom avatar created by the user in a prior step to achieve self-identification with the game character or let the user choose an avatar out of a variety of animal avatars. In a similar manner we could make the paths lead to the actual trainers created by the other groups instead of presenting them with a UI panel.
To enhance the precision of the choice making process a brief conversation with a conversational bot at the end of each path or alternatively before the beginning of the journey could help clarify matters such as training duration or exercise difficulty. The same conversational agent could be used to describe the paths which the user is deciding between so that even children who haven’t learned how to read are accommodated.

Sources

Praetorius, A. S., & Görlich, D. (2020, September). How Avatars Influence User Behavior: A Review on the Proteus Effect in Virtual Environments and Video Games. In International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-9).