Exertion Games Lab

Our paper on technology for skateboarding received a Honourable Mention for Best Paper at the ACM SIGCHI conference in Paris, France, placing it in the top 5% of all papers!

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller will be on the ABC Radio News show tonight, talking not about games for a change, but about how to design for users’ desires within the context of human-computer interaction in response to the latest debate on the CFA FireReady mobile app.

Rohit’s PhD research has been accepted (acceptance rate 37%) to be presented at the Student Research Competition at CHI 2013 in Paris, France. He receives a travel grant and the chance to present his research on using 3D printers to make physical activity more engaging through personalised souvenirs. Being a finalist means he gets the chance to win prize money as well as entry into the ACM competition. Congrats Rohit!

Our interactive skateboarding system Copy, Paste, Skate was on Channel 10’s Scope program today!

We just had 4 more publications accepted, congrats everyone involved! PDFs at the links below, some even come with a video:

• Pijnappel, S. Mueller, F. 2013. 4 Design Themes for Skateboarding. CHI 2013. Note. 4 pages. 30 sec preview video.
• Chatham, A., Mueller, F., Bernhaupt, R., Khot, R., Pijnappel, S., Toprak, C., Deen, M., Schouten, B. Game Jam. CHI 2013. Workshop (organizing). 3 pages.
• Mueller, F., Chatham, A., Toprak, C., Khot, R., Pijnappel, S., Marshall, J. HCI with Sports. CHI 2013. Special Interest Group (organizing). 4 pages. 30 sec preview video.
• Sancho Huerga, R., Lade, J., Mueller, F. Three Themes for Designing Games that Aim to Promote a Positive Body Perception in Hospitalized Children. Persuasive 2013. Short paper. 6 pages.

Sarah’s “Inside Running: The Sport of Art” starts 1 Feb 2013 in Perth, opened by Fremantle Football Club Captain Matthew Pavlich!

LumaHelm has been featured in the press again, this time in The Quintessence‘s special issue on LED technology: click on the image to read the article.

Sebastiaan’s Copy, Paste, Skate project that examines interactive technology for skateboarders is on the front page of the IT section of The Australian newspaper, with a very nice picture of Sebastiaan doing a trick using his system that offers visual, auditory and haptic feedback.

On Wed, 21st Nov, 4.30-5.30pm we will show:

Chad put together a great Game Arcade at Games for Change Australia-New Zealand at RMIT’s Design Hub, come check it out if you are around in Melbourne today and tomorrow!

Channel 10 were in the Exertion Games Lab again, having just visited last week and filming our interactive skateboarding rig, this time they shot the LumaHelm, our illuminated helmet. The results were great shots around the Design Hub, including Chad riding his bike safely as he used the LumaHelm to indicate. The picture shows Sebastiaan explaining the technology.

Wouter’s LumaHelm receives Bronze at the prestigious Spark Design Awards! The Spark Design Awards is the “world’s first multi-level design competition” with a “mission to promote better living through better design”, sponsored by Autodesk and others.

Here is the LumaHelm on the Spark Design website, including nice pictures of Wouter and the LumaHelm.

Today, Channel 10 was visiting again, this time to shoot our latest project, Sebastiaan’s interactive skateboarding obstacle system called “Copy, Paste, Skate“. It offers visual, audio, and haptic feedback to extend and re-live the skateboarding experience of succeeding at a trick. This research helps us understand how interactive technology can support a sense of achievement, called Fiero in games.

Dan Murphy did a great new video about Lumahelm:

The Exertion Games Lab has been featured under the heading “Game of Life” in RMIT’s Founder’s Day Magazine  that gets distributed yearly with the Financial Review, see page 17 in the PDF version or read the online article.

3-year PhD openings in the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Application deadline: 31 October 2012

The Exertion Games Lab (exertiongameslab.org) at RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) in Melbourne, Australia, is seeking exceptional PhD candidates to research the future of exertion games and play.

The Exertion Games Lab is looking for exceptional candidates who value an
interdisciplinary perspective, are highly motivated, willing to learn
a variety of skills, are extremely creative as well as technical, and also have highly developed analytical and communicative skills. Prior research experience is desirable and so are programming skills (such as in Processing, etc.) and hardware prototyping abilities (Arduino, etc.). If you do not have such skills, you should be excited about learning them. In essence, we are looking at potential for creativity, excellence and drive in relation to Exertion Games.

There are three PhD positions available right now:

1. WEARABLE EXERTION PLAY: The PhD candidate will collaborate with an industry
   partner to research how wearable digital play devices can support people to live a
   more physically active life as part of a large-scale campaign. The challenge here is to
   utilize the partner’s knowledge about health and the data about their customers to
   improve the player’s health, while at the same time ensure player’s autonomy and privacy.
2. DESIGN OF EXERTION GAMES: The PhD candidate researches how we can
   improve the design of exertion games to enhance both engagement and physical
   health benefits.
3. EXERTION GAMES: We also have an opening for a PhD candidate who wants to
   develop his/her own topic around the notion of play, the body and technology.
   However, this position requires a scholarship (or self-funding), which you will need to
   apply for by the same deadline. There are different options available depending on
   your circumstances, application status (e.g. domestic or international) etc., ranging
   from ticking a simple box as part of the application (for Australian nationalities), to
   completely separate applications; see www.rmit.edu.au/scholarships/research (i.e.
   International students will be mostly looking at RUIRS, and
   Australian/New Zealand citizens at APA. There is also jason.edu.au for
   more scholarships, and your home country might also offer scholarships
   to conduct PhD research overseas, for example we had great
   experiences with DAAD and Fulbright.)

Entry requirements:

You will need to have a four-year degree (Honours if you have an Australian degree) or a
three-year Bachelor and a Master’s degree. Typical backgrounds are game design,
interaction design, human-computer interaction, computer science, industrial design,
electrical engineering and arts but we are curious to hear what you can contribute. All
nationalities are encouraged to apply. The PhDs in the Exertion Games Lab take 3 years. All
applicants will need to apply for and be accepted to the PhD program in Media and
Communication at RMIT University, further details can be found at www.rmit.edu.au/mediacommunication/researchdegrees

The application deadline is 31 October 2012. Start date is early/mid 2013.

The Exertion Games Lab is a new lab that researches the future of
gaming and play in order to understand how to design better interactive
experiences, in particular games that require intense physical effort
from players. We call it the intersection between gaming and sports.
Our research is focused on the merging of play, technology and the active human
body, drawing from research streams such as interaction design, human-
computer interaction and computer games research.

The culture in the Exertion Games Lab is one of interdisciplinary
work. At the Exertion Games Lab, we do not just philosophize and write
about the future, we actively invent it. We emphasize the development
of working prototypes in order to fully understand what play is, why
we play, and how we will play in the future. We do this because we
believe playing and gaming is a fundamental part of what makes us
humans who we are, and an understanding of this brings us closer to
our vision of a better world filled with interactive technologies that
support human values.

We are offering a great open-plan lab environment in the Design Hub,
Australia’s newest interdisciplinary design research centre at RMIT University.
You will be supervised by Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller, who created the lab based on his prior
experiences from MIT’s Media Lab, Media Lab Europe, Xerox Parc, Fuji Xerox, Microsoft
Research and Stanford University.

Please email your initial expression of interest ASAP to us: exertiongameslab  at rmit.edu.au

Looking forward to reading your applications!
Thanks,
The Exertion Games Lab
http://exertiongameslab.org/about

* We should also mention that you will be doing your PhD right in the
heart of the world’s most livable city, Melbourne:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-14/melbourne-remains-worlds-most-liveable-city/4198294

* Here is what Wired said about us:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/09/exertion-games-lab-where-physical-meets-digital/

Exertion Game Lab’s Joggobot was featured on Channel 10’s Scope TV program, presented by Chad Toprak with jogging support from Josh Platt.

The Exertion Games Lab received two more awards: Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller received a Certificate of Recognition for being RMIT’s Top Media Performers for 2012, and the entire team received the Media Star of the Year award in the category Research Team.

We have moved into our new home, the brilliant Design Hub, RMIT’s flagship building for everything about design research! It is grand, open, collaborative and perfect for our research on games. Here are some first pictures; the space looks empty here, but we are already filling almost all of it with our gaming gear. The address is RMIT Building no. 100 (!), Level 4, corner of Swanston St and Victoria St, only 40 meters from the old location. We welcome you all to have a look! Thanks to Sebastiaan for the photos and David Powell for the Design Hub picture from Swanston St.

Wouter secured a 1000 Euro win for Joggobot at the Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Awards 2012 at the International Digital Media and Business Festival in Tampere, Finland! Well done Wouter and everyone else who was involved!