Virtual Marathon System Where Humans and Agents Compete
Hirofumi Kishino, Yasuhiko Kitamura · 2014
Overweight and obesity due to lack of physical activities incur a serious social problem. Recently Japanese people have more interest in well-being issues, and a number of the people try to walk regularly and further participate in city marathon races. It is not easy for the people, who do not usually exercise, to begin marathon running suddenly. We, in this paper, report the development and a preliminary evaluation of virtual marathon system to make people experience a marathon race easily and virtually using smartphones. We display a marathon course on a smartphone using Google maps and the Street view, and move an agent on the course according to the user's running distance measured by GPS. We, furthermore, introduce the pseudo simultaneous competition scheme to make users to compete with others running at different place and time. Competitor agents, which reflect the location of the other users using the system, appear on the screen of smartphone to encourage the user to do more physical activities.