We've had a paper accepted in ACM CHI PLAY 2024! Here's the abstract:
VR exergaming is a promising motivational tool to incentivise exercise. We present a novel VR exergaming method called social interactive feedforward. The player competes with an 'enhanced model' of one of their friends in a real-time VR environment, showing improved performance levels in a way the player can relate to. Social interactive feedforward was tested in a cycling-based VR exergame and players competed with enhanced models of themselves, their friend, and a stranger moving at the same enhanced pace. Results show that friend-modelled social interactive feedforward improves performance and intrinsic motivation the most. This indicates that the mere association of the enhanced model with their friend results in a rapid improvement in performance and motivation which implies that social feedforward was successfully elicited by using an enhanced friend's model. This widens the application of self-modelled feedforward to a wide range of social options which enables players to also reap the benefits of socialising in addition to feedforward benefits.
Reference
Barathi, S. C., Finnegan, D. J., Proulx, M. J., O'Neill, E., Lutteroth, C.
Advantages of Friend-Modelled Social Interactive Feedforward for VR Exergaming
ACM CHI PLAY 2024