STAR: Superhuman Training in Augmented Reality Marie Kegeleers Shivam Miglani Gijs M.W. Reichert Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Nestor Z. Salamon J. Timothy Balint Stephan G. Lukosch Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Rafael Bidarra Delft University of Technology [email protected] ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION The goals of Superhuman Sports games include to involve physical Over the last couple of decades, the use of computers and mobile activity and enhance the skills and abilities of a human through devices has grown significantly. This means that people spend more technology. They are played for fun, competition or to improve time sitting inside using their devices. This reduces their amount the players’ health condition. To meet these goals, we designed of physical activity and is therefore considered to be detrimental to and developed STAR: Superhuman Training in Augmented Reality, a person’s health. an augmented reality adventure shooter, and implemented it on Exercise and sports-related activities can be augmented with the Microsoft Hololens. Our game promotes physical activity by technology to explore new possibilities. Kunze et al. described making you avoid dangerous enemies and gather energy to deal this research field as Superhuman Sports [8]. Superhuman sports with this threat while navigating a narrow path above lava. Social combine the competitive and physical elements of a sport with interaction is stimulated by its multiplayer mode, in which players technology to give a player a superhuman-like experience by vir- have to work together to destroy an energy core. Player testing tually enhancing the abilities of the human body and removing showed that we achieve our goal of physical exercise by making some of its limitations present in the real world. In many cases, the player move at a pace slightly less than brisk walking and Superhuman Sports can also involve elements of gaming. A study that the game is fun and immersive. These results show that STAR of game-based approaches on improving health by Baranowski[1] is a promising step in the right direction for the development of shows that these game-based approaches indeed have a positive superhuman sports using augmented reality. effect. According to Vorderer et al.[18], the desire to be the best and compete is one of the most important elements of sports games. CCS CONCEPTS Therefore, when designing a successful sports game these social and competitive aspects play an important role. • Human-centered computing → Mixed / augmented reality; While there are games available that motivate players to exercise • Software and its engineering → Interactive games; in some way, not a lot of them use augmented reality. Examples of these type of games that do not use augmented reality include KEYWORDS applications like Wii Sports [14] and Wii Fit [15], as well as Xbox Superhuman sports, Augmented Reality, Gaming, Exergaming Kinect games like Dance Central [6]. Next to the aforementioned games that do not use augmented reality, there are games that do ACM Reference Format: use augmented reality to promote exercise, such as GeoBoid [10]. Marie Kegeleers, Shivam Miglani, Gijs M.W. Reichert, Nestor Z. Salamon, In this game, you have to run around to collect virtual Geoboids J. Timothy Balint, Stephan G. Lukosch, and Rafael Bidarra. 2018. STAR: that are moving in clouds at different locations. Another example Superhuman Training in Augmented Reality. In Proceedings of Superhuman Sports Design Challenge (2018). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. of a game that uses (mobile) augmented reality and involves some https: //doi.org/10.1145/3210299.3210306 kind of movement as it encourages you to walk a certain distance is Pokémon GO [13]. However, there are not a lot of these games available yet, most of them lack a social or competitive aspect. Many Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or augmented reality applications are also for mobile phones, which classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed are not practical when augmented reality is combined with physical for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation activity and the players need to be aware of their surroundings. on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, In this paper, we present the design and implementation of ‘STAR to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a :Superhuman Training in Augmented Reality’, which is our at- fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. SHS '18, July 2–5, 2018, Delft, Netherlands tempt at making a Superhuman Sports game which combines the © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. attractiveness of computer gaming and exercising. STAR exploits ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6407-2/18/07…$15.00 augmented reality to augment superhuman abilities and creates a https://doi.org/10.1145/3210299.3210306 2018, July 2018, Delft, the Netherlands M. Kegeleers et al. competitive and social aspect to create an engaging and fun game. this section, we elaborate on these aspects with additional empha- The paper is organized in the following manner: following the re- sis on how our game makes use of the HoloLens mechanics and lated work (Sec. 2), we discuss the game design of STAR (Sec. 3) and controls. We will also focus on the sports aspects of the game in its technical implementation (Sec. 4). Later, we examine the func- the last part of this section. tionality of STAR as a game and as a tool for exercise (Sec. 5), before concluding and presenting foundations for future work (Sec. 6). 3.1 Theme and Story STAR is a hybrid of first-person shooting, adventure and exergam- 2 RELATED WORK ing [16], a combination of gaming and exercising. It is a two player game which requires collaboration between the players in order to This project’s research and design are closely related to augmented finish. The game transforms your surroundings into a high-tech reality (AR) and games that require physical exercise, also known superhuman training facility. The training facility levitates above as exergames. a moving river of lava. The two players are superhumans with When we look at games that involve augmented reality and superhuman abilities. The game allows the players to train with promote exercise, we find that there are a few games out there these abilities to learn how to use and control them as a superhero that combine these two aspects, for example, AR Pacman [3] and would before they go out and use their superhuman abilities to ARQuake [17]. AR Pacman requires the player to collect all yel- save the world. The abilities in the game allow the players to deal low dots just like the regular game but the dots are placed in the with the threat of enemy training-robots which are attacking them surroundings of the player, requiring the player to physically run and to scan solid game objects to see through them, more on this around to collect them while avoiding the ghosts. ARQuake is the later. These abilities come at the cost of energy which needs to be augmented reality version of the classic shooter game Quake where collected. The goal is to destroy the energy core which powers the the player is surrounded by the game’s environment and has to enemy robots while trying to avoid damaging yourself by falling physically move and aim to shoot. into the lava river or getting hit by the robots shooting. Augmented reality is not limited to specialized hardware such as the Microsoft HoloLens [11], Google Glass Enterprise Edition [20] 3.2 Gameplay or hardware specifically developed for the examples mentioned above. Currently, smartphones are the most accessible AR devices. The goal of STAR is to survive long enough to be able to destroy an Some examples of augmented reality mobile applications are Calory energy core and score points by shooting robots. To complete the Battle AR[19] and the previously mentioned Geoboids [10]. Geoboids game, the players need to defeat the enemy robots which can be uses video see-through technology and spatial sound to make the done by destroying the energy core by shooting at it a number of player to move between locations. Calory Battle AR has players times, each in specific places. In order to survive, each player needs run to different locations in order to diffuse a bomb. Providing the energy to use their laser beams to shoot the robots. To collect energy, player with objectives to move between is a simple and intuitive the players scan the paths above the lava, which also costs energy, way to promote exercise with games. Similarly, we promote move- to find energy orbs hidden at random locations underneath the ment by having players search their environment while traversing path. Energy slowly regenerates over time, which prevents either a narrow path and dodge projectiles fired by virtual training robots. player from completely running out of energy. The short-term goals These aspects will be discussed in more detail in Section 3. are navigating the paths, scanning for energy, collecting energy Similar to augmented reality, virtual reality can be used to create and shooting training robots and the core. The long-term goal is to games that get players to be physically active.