In recent years, exercise games have been criticized for not being able to engage their players into levels of physical activity that are high enough to yield significant health benefits. A major challenge in the design of exergames, however, is that it is difficult to precisely assess the amount of physical activity an exergame yields due to limitations of existing techniques to assess energy expenditure of exergaming activities. With recent advances in commercial depth sensing technology to accurately track players’ motions in 3D, this talk will present a technique called Vizical that uses state-of the art regression algorithms to accurately predict energy expenditure in real time. Vizical may allow for designing exergames that are more vigorous to play and stimulate larger health benefits or exergames that can precisely burn a specific amount of calories in a given time.
