This week, the CardioActive team set out to accomplish a great many things. Having already created three different demonstration games to discover useful mechanics and platforms, and having played a multitude of active video games (AVG), we decided it was time to sift through our findings and decide on which direction to go for the remaining portion of the semester.
We started out early in the week, meeting with Dr. Joseph Samosky, Director, Simulation & Medical Technology Innovation Center, University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Samosky was kind enough to meet with the team and share his experiences and insight about the challenge of getting people to exercise. He spoke on not only the benefits of exercise, but the damage to the body brought on my inactivity. He brought up great questions about demographics, hardware, and entertainment. We have folded his advice into our project where appropriate.
We also did quite a bit of research on our own. Each team member took either a person, website, research facility, or piece of hardware and researched what has been done in the past with that equipment or what studies have shown coming out of certain publications. We turned up pages of useful information as well as links to videos that used hardware in novel ways to get the body to move. You can find our conclusions on the Research page of our site.
On Friday afternoon, Anthony Daniels, visiting professor, also stopped by to give his take on our assignment thus far, and stressed the importance of story in getting our demographic to take part in our game. He also had great insight on how useful some of our mechanics may or may not be, and even played one of our demo games.
We ended the week by solidifying our demographic, hardware, and target parameters for the game. We will spend the weekend brainstorming great stories to in which to wrap our AVG and then present our results to our faculty advisor and client contact before quarter walkarounds to get their feedback.
It’s been a great week and we’re all proud of the work we’ve done.
