Sphery Racer

A futuristic fitness game for the ExerCube

Sphery Racer is a futuristic fitness game. In this interdisciplinary cooperation with sport scientists and game researchers of Sphery AG, the game is developed exclusively for Sphery's ExerCube, a fitness room where the game is projected on the walls. The software is tracking the player's performance with motion sensors and a heart rate tracker. The game then matches difficulty, complexity, speed, and sound to the performance during the workout, based on Sphery's elaborated Dual Flow training algorithm. This ensures an optimal training for body and mind, not too challenging but not to easy either.

Ingame, the players are driving along a racetrack on a hoverboard, through a holographic underwater world. Along the track are various obstacles, where the players have to perform the appropriate workout moves. The moves are selected to provide a holistic functional training and vary by chosen difficulty level. As long as the players are doing the movement correctly, difficulty and speed of the race track will increase. If mistakes happen, the game will decrease the difficulty and complexity, but will not punish the players for it. Playing with this adaptive difficulty is so engaging that after the game, players usually have lost track of how much time has passed, and how vigorous their workout was, because they were “totally in the flow”.

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Sphery Racer is the second project, where we are working with Sphery CEO Anna Martin-Niedecken. The former R&D project Plunder Planet, which was located at the Zurich University of the Arts focused on the research-based development of an adaptive fitness game setting for children and young adolescents.

If you are interested in the Sphery fitness game solution, don’t hesitate to contact them, the ExerCube package will be up for purchase very soon! Alternatively you can get a test training in Sphery’s office in Zurich oder at one of the many events. To see where the Exercube will be exhibited next, please check sphery.ch/news.

Publications

  1. Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken, Tiziana Schwarz and Alexandra Schättin (2021). - Comparing the Impact of Heart Rate-Based In-Game Adaptations in an Exergame-Based Functional High-Intensity Interval Training on Training Intensity and Experience in Healthy Young Adults - DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.572877

  2. Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken, Andrea Mahrer, Katja Rogers, Eling D. de Bruin (2020) - “HIIT” the ExerCube: Comparing the Effectiveness of Functional High-Intensity Interval Training in Conventional vs. Exergame-Based Training- DOI:10.3389/fcomp.2020.00033

  3. Martin-Niedecken, Rogers, Turmo Vidal, Mekler (2019). ExerCube vs. Personal Trainer: Evaluating a Holistic, Immersive, and Adaptive Fitness Game Setup - DOI: 10.1145/3290605.3300318.

  4. Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken, Elena Márquez Segura, Katja Rogers, Stephan Niedecken (2019). Towards Socially Immersive Fitness Games: An Exploratory Evaluation Through Embodied Sketching - DOI:10.1145/3341215.3356293

  5. Martin-Niedecken, Anna & Mekler, Elisa. (2018). The ExerCube: Participatory Design of an Immersive Fitness Game Environment - In book: Serious Games, Proceedings of the 4th Joint International Conference, JCSG 2018, pp.263-275. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-02762-9_28.