Exertion Games Lab

Chad, Eberhard, Danielle and Floyd are back from CHI 2012 in Austin, Texas, the largest and premier conference in human-computer interaction. It was a big success for the Exertion Games Lab, with Chad exhibiting Hanging off a Bar, Danielle Light Arrays and hipDisk, and Eberhard Joggobot. Overall, we presented 8 publications from members of the lab. Chad was also offered a PhD place and a job with Microsoft, and Chad and Eberhard also won a game prize. We also held an Exertion Games Lab networking event, Danielle gave a great alt.chi talk, Danielle and Floyd were asked to co-chair Interactivity again next year and we received a Best Paper Honourable Mention for “Balancing Exertion Experiences“. Lastly, we presented our games work in a workshop on Future Game User Research, and promoted the lab to a lot of very smart and interesting people.

After having 8 publications and exhibiting 4 interactive projects, the Exertion Games Lab team who flew to Austin, TX for CHI 2012 is back in Melbourne to share their experiences with you! Visit the lab for a brief rundown of the trip and ask any questions you might have to prepare you for CHI next year. Everyone is welcome!

Where: Exertion Games Lab, RMIT (Building 9, Level 1, Room 27|32)
When: Wednesday 16th May, @ 3-4PM

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller from the Exertion Games Lab has been invited to speak at the “Next Generation Multimedia Research and Development” event on 2&3 May 2012 at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus.

Josh on guitar, visually amplified by our interactive helmet. Would it enhance the spectator experience of a musical audience? We will found out when we start performing with it on the street. Next stage: hooking it up to an accelerometer, so we can make it respond to physical movement!
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Our own Harry Lee is in the latest issue of the Qantas Inflight magazine, Danielle found him while on the way to the US presenting her work at CHI’12!

We will be having another paper editing session:

Thursday, 26 April, 11.45-12.45 in the Exertion Games Lab.

We will be focusing on Related Work: if you have a Related Work section of one of your papers you would like to get feedback on, please print out ca. 6 copies, double-spaced, and bring them along. We will then edit each others’ papers, to make them even greater! Everyone welcome.

Ruth Huerga will be giving a talk about her prior work on

Tuesday, 24 April, 1-2pm in the Exertion Games Lab.

Ruth Huerga is doing a Masters at RMIT and spends a lot of time in the lab as she brings in expertise in interactive storytelling and embodied poetry, currently working on a project with children in hospital.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is giving a guest lecture in the Research and Practice lecture series organised by Chris Barker on Thu, 12 Apr 2012, at RMIT in Bldg. 13, Room 1, from 5.30-6.30pm. Floyd will be talking about how the Exertion Games Lab’s games are not as much ready-made solutions to problems, but rather research vehicles to generate knowledge. This knowledge then allows others, such as game designers to be guided towards their own solutions and inspires industry towards thinking outside their comfort zone.

Kalonica Quigley and her team, who are currently working on a new health and safety game with Stefan Greuter in the Exertion Games Lab, received an “Honorable Mention” for their “Once Upon A Spacetime” PC/Mac game at the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco, USA:

We will be having another abstract editing session!

Wednesday, 11 April, 12.30-1.30 in the Exertion Games Lab.

If you have an abstract you’d like to get feedback on, please print out ca. 6 copies, double-spaced, and bring them along. We will then edit each others’ abstracts, to make them even greater! Everyone welcome.

Games & Play Reading Group meets will now be held on Fridays 12:30-1:30pm every week.

Yummy vegetarian sandwiches from Pearson & Murphy’s provided.

On Wednesday, 4 April 2012, Wouter will be giving a little talk about what he learnt from writing a full paper. He will pass on knowledge from others, which he “wilfully ignored in my own process but now wholeheartedly support”, as well as share his own lessons.

This week’s Reading Group takes place on Thursday, 29 March 2012, at a new time-slot: 12.30-1.30. Rhys will be leading the discussion on the CHI paper “Practical, Appropriate, Empirically-Validated Guidelines for Designing Educational Games”. Lunch provided. Email Rhys if you don’t have access to the paper.

On Wednesday (4-Apr-2012) Wouter from our lab will be giving a little talk about his learnings from writing a full paper with very little training in paper writing.

Feel free to bring your own sandwich, sushi roll or lunch salad. (Good) coffee + tea will be provided. Also feel free to bring in personal questions and challenges around paper writing that you’d like to discuss.

Harry won a prestigious Spirit of Youth Australia award from Qantas to attend the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, USA and South by South West Interactive in Austin, USA. He will talk about his experiences and what he learned for his game design work in the Exertion Games Lab on Wed, 28th Mar 2012, from 1pm-2pm. Everyone welcome, bring your lunch!

Chad gave a great interview today about the lab and his work on Exertion Games on public transport in response to Get Active month, you can read all about it here.

Danielle from the Exertion Games Lab has been awarded a grant from the Copyright Agency Career Fund to attend CHI in Austin, Texas in May and her Doctoral Thesis, Swing That Thing : moving to move. The poetics of embodied engagement, has been awarded the Monash University Vice-Chancellor’s Mollie Holman Medal for best doctoral thesis. Congratulations!

Today the ABC’s Catalyst TV crew visited the Exertion Games Lab to shoot video footage of Joggobot, the flying robot that is a social companion for joggers.

“Catalyst is a program that sees science as a dynamic force changing our world.” They were very engaged, and spent the entire day in the lab, shooting footage of how we developed the idea of Joggobot, people’s perceptions of the Joggobot on a running track (see picture) and tested it themselves in our gym.

Unfortunately Eberhard, the main creator behind Joggobot could not have been there, but we highlighted him many times!