Technical Excellence Award at CHI PLAY 2022 for Alexandra Kalaitzidou, Nathalie Senechal and Paschalis Dimitriou

“E-WAFE” - A Full Body Embodied Social Exergame developed by an interdisciplinary team of international students claimed the “Technical Excellence” Award and published as a paper at CHI PLAY 22 in Bremen. The project was started in the scope of the lab “Immersive Experience Design” held by Krishnan Chandran at IXLab, and further developed on a free time basis. Alexandra Kalaitzidou, Nathalie Senechal and Paschalis Dimitriou presented their work at the Student Game Design Competition, where it was played and appreciated by the competition committee, scientists and game developers. The game is a VR experience with full body tracking and machine learning algorithms for pose recognition, addressing the modern problems of increased health risks and diseases due to low physical activity. It aims to combine physical exercise with the element of game for increased motivation and engagement. Being a competitive exergame it also implements the element of social connectedness, tackling the problem of isolation. The tracking and representation of the whole player’s body in VR in combination with machine learning pose recognition is a novel approach, not only creating an immersive experience, but also allowing to evaluate the correct execution of exercises. The gameplay is based on using the elemental forces to fight in a floating arena, controlling them by executing physical exercises such as squats and shadowboxing. Further gameplay concepts were developed and will be implemented in the course of the next time. The team members are eager to continue working on the project, bringing it to its final state with the goal of a potential commercial release.

Conference participation was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Freestate of Saxony under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder (programme FOSTER).