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Games like
Prop Cycle,
Dance Dance Revolution and
Mocap Boxing
herald a new era of digital arcade entertainment where physical fitness is a byproduct of play.
Products like
Toysight
(for Apple Mac's iSight webcam),
along with fitness-oriented game controllers like
Kilowatt Sport from Powergrid Fitness,
have brought exercise games from the arcade to the desktop.
Is this the future?
Glen Raphael at videogameworkout.com thinks so.
His blog is devoted to exercise games; and I say more power to the man.
Tactile user interfaces, and particularly games, seem like a great way to get fit;
and, personally, I've long suspected that the much-hyped intelligent software agents of the future
(you know, the ones who're supposed to be our virtual butlers, receptionists, stylists and PAs)
will look less like Jeeves
or Microsoft's Clippy and more like
those alarm clocks you slam against the wall to make them shut up.
While we're on this subject, I've also speculated about using the
CSAFE protocol
(a standard API for exercise machines: bikes, treadmills, elliptic trainers,
et cetera)
to make a custom keyboard for playing online RPGs like
World of Warcraft.
Think about it: in those games you spend ages trudging from location to location on the world map,
holding down the "walk" key while your brain atrophies and your
back and neck develop permanent kinks.
Wouldn't it be relatively straightforward, and ultimately healthier, to use
CSAFE's cmdGetSpeed command
to make your elliptic trainer effectively press the walk key for you?
That is, hook your keyboard up to your exercise machine, so that walking on the machine
translated to walking in the game.
Given the amount of effort NIH expends to fight obesity,
this kind of thing really seems to make sense.
Obviously it'd be even cooler to use other CSAFE commands (like cmdSetGear) to change resistance
in response to game terrain (although this is getting into game-specific UI mods, which would
require game companies to open up their APIs... and you'd probably see a Blizzard in Hell before
that... heh).
Just a thought; but if any student out there is interested in taking this on as a summer project
(maybe commercialising it) then give me a shout....
-- IanHolmes - 27 Sep 2005
Update: it seems there are several products that do this already.
See Glen's blog entry on the subject for a run-down.
(Still, it would be fun to try doing it the low-budget, do-it-yourself way.)
-- IanHolmes - 28 Sep 2005 |
