Health Training seminar at TKK

EXERGAME-project together with PM&RG group at the Helsinki University of Technology will arrange 'Health Training' seminar in Fall 2006. The aim of the seminar (lasting from September to December 2006) is to innovate ubiquitous, mobile and wearable exergames or wellness technologies. We shall co-operate with a range of experts advising the students about different user groups from special groups to seniors, technologies from wearables to ubiquitous solutions and current findings from consumer research.

More information can be found from the PM&RG web site.

Interface Realism

My idol superguru Perttu "QuiQui, KickAssKungFu" Hämäläinen has introduced an interesting term: interface realism. He sees that the realism of user's actions and the audiovisual output both contribute to the overall realism of the user experience. This notion is very accurate and interesting especially in games. Juhanna (Höysniemi) and Perttu state in their article "Children’s and Parents’ Perception of Full-Body Interaction and Violence in Martial Arts Game" that 'user interface realism is enabled by the increasing signal processing power of modern computers and it's consequently developing real-time computer vision and hearing technology. New interfaces enable new forms of psychomotor and cognitive learning. You can interact with game worlds and characters with your movements and voice, e.g., practice martial arts with
virtual opponents. You can control a game by singing, which can develop your musical skills.'

Interface realism is one thing that rebuilds the industry of digital games interlinking digital games with other (also more beneficial) applications and new user groups. It is one way of stepping out from the shadow of 1980s computer games with their narrowly defined genres and structures.

Another Exergames Blog

While this blog is focusing on mobile exergames and VTT's EXERGAME-project, Exergames.com blog is covering the wide area of different physical interface, exergame and software solutions.
See http://www.exergames.com/