Virtual Reality Experience

ABSTRACT—Doing exercises is important for health. However, it is often hard for people to motivate themselves to do the recommended amount of exercise. Virtual reality exergames have the potential to overcome this aspect by letting the people forget about the actual exercise.

This is done by giving the player an immersive virtual reality experience with an interactive virtual interface and three different difficulty levels of interaction.

KEYWORDS—Virtual reality, room-scale, interface design, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, exergame, health

I. INTRODUCTION

People know that it is important for their own health to do some sort of exercise on a regular basis. In fact, doing an exercise for only ten minutes, may increase concentration temporarily and

Using HTC Vive or Oculus Rift offers an interaction area of approximately 12 square meters. In contrast, a smaller interaction area is offered by systems like Kinect [17], EyeToy [18] and Wii [19]. Therefore, some aspects have to be kept in mind.

A. Interaction levels

There are three different difficulty levels of interaction in these VR exergames [16].

1) Easy

The easy interaction is grabbing an object. The player has to reach for the object and make a fist in order to grab it.

2) Medium

The next difficulty is to pick up a gun and shoot. The player has to bend down, reach for the object and grab it by clenching his hand. While clenching his hand the player has to press the trigger to shoot the gun. It may happen that the player forgets to clench his hand while shooting. The gun falls to the ground and has to be grabbed again.

3) Difficult.

The difficult interaction is throwing the ball. While squeezing the controller the player has to perform a projectile motion with his hand and unclench his hand at the right moment. It is difficult to unclench the hand to release the trigger but while holding the

There are things to grab and throw and also a gun to aim and shoot. Grabbing means to reach for an object and make a fist by squeezing the controller. This is really important, because the interaction with computer mouse and keyboard is totally different to an interaction in VR. It is also essential to make the game not too easy but also not too hard. One approach could be to evaluate the player’s skills while he plays the tutorial. According to these results the difficulty of the game is determined. The difficulty should be adjusted to the player’s progress to be challenging.

During the tutorial, the player has to reach as high and as far as he could, with this data his size and the length of his arms is determined.

These two parameters are used to calibrate the next game. Without the calibration, the game will not work as intended.

The border of the island symbolizes the end of the safe interaction area.

At the beginning, a menu is shown in front of the player. By pointing at this menu, a laser beam with its source in the controller appears and enables the player to select a menu button.

B. Exergame 1: Exercise ship stretch