Exergaming: Minbike

Only 25% of American youth meet the current physical activity (PA) recommendations. There is a real need to develop new approaches to promote PA which is fun and engaging for this population. The objective for our work is to evaluate a new exergaming platform as a tool to promote physical activity in children. The iXercise platform that we developed, consists of an exercise bicycle, fitted with sensors and microcontrollers, and an exergame (MineBike) that requires a user to peddle to navigate through the environment.  MineBike includes a series of quests with different exercise levels and corresponding rewards that can be used for mining/building activities. In an initial study, we assessed participants’ 1) physiological responses (heart rate and oxygen uptake), 2) exercise intensity/work rate in different stages of the game (watts), 3) time at target HR and 3) behavioral responses (enjoyment, motivation and engagement questionnaires). HR and work rate were successfully consistently monitored during a 40-min MineBike exergaming session. What we notices is that MineBike successfully induced moderate- to vigorous- intensity exercise and participants could achieve > 20 min at the target heart rate (>120 bpm). Our perception is that participants universally enjoyed MineBike and were engaged in the game experience. From these preliminary results we can conclude that the iXercise platform might prove to be a promising new approach to promote physical activity in healthy children and as a therapy in children with a wide variery of clinical conditions. In the next phase, we are incorporating a more cohesive game story, multiplayer capability, several quests with different levels of difficulty, and a more incentive based reward system that in conjunction with an Intelligent Agent embedded in the system will induce adgherence to aprescribed  exercise program during a MineBike session. 

Cloud Gaming: A flexible adaptive infrastructure for single player online gaming

Applying cloud technology to 3D interactive multimedia applications is a promising way to provide flexible and cost efficient online high bandwidth immersive services to a large population of end users. One main reason cloud systems are popular among users is the fact that it relaxes the hardware requirements for high-end interactive visual applications. As most of the computational tasks are done on cloud servers, users no longer need to upgrade their hardware as frequently to keep up with the ever increasing high end computing requirements of the latest applications. Moreover, cloud systems make it easier for a user to enjoy applications on different platforms, including mobile devices that are usually not powerful enough to run high-end, memory intensive services. In short, applying cloud technology to high end immersive applications has advantages in cost efficiency and flexibility both for the end users and the service providers. However, there are two main drawbacks to applying cloud technology to 3D interactive multimedia services: 1) high bandwidth utilization and 2) latency. In our work we propose a flexible framework that addresses the two problems by using a combination of collaborative rendering, progressive meshes, and 3D image warping techniques. The experimental results obtained so far show that the proposed system can reduce the bandwidth usage and improve the visual quality by utilizing local computing power on the client. The results also show that it is possible to reduce the interactive latency by sacrificing the visual quality in our system.