Hello everyone I'm Soojeong Yoo from the University
of Sydney and I'm presenting the paper called
Embedding a VR Game studio in a Sedentary Workplace
Use, Experience and Exercise Benefits. This paper is
co-authored with Phil Gough and Judy Kay.
For many people especially people in the sedentary
jobs achieving the recommended level of physical
activity is a significant challenge. This is
important as so many people have
sedentary jobs. For example, studies have
shown that 50% of jobs in Australia
performed while seated.
While traditional computer games are played seated,
VR games that use head-mounted displays can provide
valuable levels of exercise. With research is
showing that VR games can provide 8 minutes
of moderate to vigorous physical activity from 10
minutes of total playtime. And also research shows
that the player perceives a lower level of physical
exertion than they actually experience. So our
work explores one way to tackle this challenge for
people in a sedentary job that involve long periods
of seated computer work. These workers often feel
like they don't have time to do 30 minutes of
moderate activity during their
workday. So we explored whether VR games are a
useful way of introducing some physical activity
into these workplaces.
This was framed as two research questions. Firstly
what specific health benefit do participants gain
from VR game studio sessions. And second what
motivates participants to use the VR
game studio. And how do we observing them to using
it. To set up the study we made use a dedicated
room which included HTC Vive system and games
available through the Steam VR rather than a
bespoke setup. So all our equipment and games are
commercially available. 5 games for the
HTC Vive from Steam VR. Several factors informed it
Firstly we chose Hot Squat, Fruit Ninja
and Holopoint based on previous research, which
demonstrated that this games enabled people to
gain relatively high actual exertion compared with
their perceived exertion. We then did on an
analysis of online discussion boards and
recommendations for popular and fun games, and also
included Holoball and Longbow. To meet the
goal for exercise. We selected the game with a
range of movements during play, a range of
intensity. For example Hot Squat involves
squatting and make heavy use of the large lower
body muscles. And so and requires high exertion.
And then also we chosen 5 games so that
participant had a choice. And to have a closed
set of games so that we could make a comparison
between them, and the game was quick to play
and learn.
The procedure for our study was as follows. In
the first to 3 weeks, we recruited participants,
including performing the screening
questionnaire. This allowed us to make sure there were
no other health issues likely to affect their
ability to participate, and make sure that they
were not likely to feel ill, while they're playing
the game.
We also gave participants an activity tracker, to
recorded their incidental level of activity. And
after these we made a studio available to
participants for 5 weeks. During this time we
collected various data. When participant to enter
the VR studio researcher asked them to wear the
Polar heart-rate monitor and sit down for 2 to
3 minutes to get their resting heart rate.
Then we ask a questions on 1) why they decided
to come and 2) what game they wanted to play for the
day. Then while they playing the game we also
collected their active heart rate. After the game play
we ask them to sit down again and
collected their recovery heart rate. We
asked the participant perceived exertion using
Borg’s Scale and also ask to rank enjoyment of the
game on a scale of 1 to 7.
At the end of the week 5, we asked for feedback
from participants about the studio, and we
received some comments about leaderboard so they
can compete with others, and refreshments such as
chocolate bars. Then we continue to make the VR
game studio available for remaining 3 weeks.
with those improvements.
We recruited 11 participants for the study. To
be eligible, participants needed to have a
sedentary job at the workplace and their workplace
had to be in walking distance from the VR game
studio. All of the participants were generally
healthy. 6 out of 11 participants actively
engaged in regular physical activity. The chart
here shows the average amount of each level of
physical activity. Vigorous in orange, moderate in
green, and light in blue. The games were played for
different durations, which shows in this chart.
We can also see that the playtime for
each games is dominated by moderate or physical
level of activity.
This is more clear when we compare the proportion
of active activity level for each game. Holopoint and
Hot Squat are clearly the most effective game to
provide physical activity.
And also it's worth noting that
all games provided at least the moderate activity
for more than 60% over their playtime.
Out of our 11 participants, we can see that 6 of
them over half gained more than 50% of
their total physical activity from the VR on the
day they came to the studio. This was particularly
notable some of the participants were quite
inactive though they were generally healthy and
averaged less than 6000 steps daily. This led
to a very low number of active minutes from their
daily routine which was greatly
helped by the VR studio. In addition, on the day that
they came to the studio, 4 of our participant made it all
over the 30-minute per day threshold that is
recommended by a public health experts. This figure
shows that the majority of participants had
more than 30 minuteof physical activity when their
VR and step activity was combined on the day they
came to the studio. While the studio made a
significant contribution to many of our
participant. We can also see that it is not
getting all our participants over the 30 min
threshold on the day they played a VR game.
To help us understand this more we also looked at
the players motivation to choose to play the VR
games.
To help us understand this more we also look
at the players motivation to visit the game studio.
At each session players were asked why they
wanted to come to the game studio. And then we
clustered these using affinity diagram, and came
up with 4 main reasons: Work affective factors,
physical activity, fun to play, and game competition.
Out of all of these, the Affective work factors was the most
common and. 48% of all responses relating
relating to the work environment. These included
things like participant feeling like it would
help them to focus at work, or just simply
wanted to take a break from the work. This was the
only factor that all participants had at least
once.
The next most common was to get physical activity
at 23% of all responses, whether at the
start or end of the day, or to gain some exercise.
The third motivation we found it was to just
have fun, particularly long day after teaching.
This accounted for 18% of our responses.
And finally, friendly competition between other
other participants or by themselves was a
motivation for some of our participants, with
11% of all responses. These games were each
ranked for their enjoyment by the participants.
Longbow was the stand out as the most popular
game particularly for our participants who
clocked up a combined 11 hours over the course
of the study. This enjoyable game also provided
an opportunity to get exercise.
There were some limitation to our study, which may
translate to real world implementations. We had a
single VR game studio. This also meant we had
to limit the number of participants. We used
multiple devices to track physical activity. There
were couple of reasons for this. Mainly the high
quality tracker used in the sessions was not
appropriate to be worn all day by participant over
8 weeks, so an activity tracker was provided
This like Pebble watch. But the watch doesn't
recognise the VR games as a physical activity
as it is programmed to record the steps. And
finally we also note that heart-rate may increase
by about 10 to 20 BPM as effect of
excitement of the games rather than physical exercise,
which is a topic for future research.
We have a couple of takeaway points. First
participants got physical activity while having
fun and taking a break from their work. VR is
one avenue for people in sedentary jobs to get
physical activity. Six participants only met the
30-minute recommendation on days they played VR games.
Other insight about the studio, we found that the
most common reason using the lab were because
of work affective factors, like taking a break during
the work. We found that participants were
competing amongst themselves, and this social
dimension was an encouragement to play. To sum up
our study demonstrated that playing VR games was
enough motivation for our participants to come at
least once a week, take a break from the work, play
a fun game, and also get some exercise. Thank you
for listening.