Journal Entry 1

The inaugural entry into our Media Sandbox journal: I suppose an appropriate starting point would be detailing a little more regarding our research interest and how we have begun to develop this into a plan that is gradually coming together.

We are investigating how heart rate biometrics might be integrated into active videogames. Both Nintendo and Ubisoft have both recently revealed that they are building sensors of this sort for the Wii and PC respectively. As the first parties taking the risk on the hardware development, they seem to be remaining fairly tight lipped about their wider software interests, although it does seem that at the moment it seems to be in the vein of ‘relaxation games’.

However as an authorised third party developer looking to gain a potential first-mover advantage and USP in this area, Remode wishes to investigate how this technology might be used to innovate the already popular active and fitness games segment. This space is particularly exciting in regards to the Wii; a platform that already has a complementing control scheme and suitable customer demographic.

The idea is that a pulse oximeter sensor clips on one finger and takes the players heart reading, feeding it into the game. The player is then theoretically free to use the other hand to operate the Wiimote or other gesture detection based controllers. Where the research comes in is understanding what activities a player could undertake to ‘spike’ their heart rate temporarily and how these might be profiled in a physiological sense. Naturally it is particularly important to analyse the differences and similarities that might exist from person to person (within a subject demographic) as this would form the argument for any robust game design. If there are indeed many definitive similarities (how fast does heart rate climb? How fast does it descend? How much does it climb? Etc) between how, say, sprinting on the spot for 10 seconds, increases heart rate in 20-30 year old adults then data from these various exercises can start to form the basis of a designers ‘toolkit’.

The logical next step would be to use this data to make some sort of proof-of-concept demo. What is exciting is that this doesn’t necessarily need to be another exercise-video styled fitness game, but could be more akin to other active wii games or core games. For example imagine if sprinting on the spot for X amount of time gave your character a huge power-up, enabling them to jump really far or charge up and indestructible shield. All this is technically possible, but the supporting research and statistics are a crucial prerequisite in understanding how a game like this might be designed.