Paper Reading #9: Jogging over a Distance Between Europe and Australia

Jogging over a Distance between Europe and Australia. 

Florian Mueller is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University. However, he's previously worked at the University of Melbourne and Microsoft Research in Asia.

Frank Vetere is a senior lecture specializing in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Melbourne.

Martin R. Gibbs is a lecturer at the University of Melbourne. 

Darren Edge is a Microsoft Research Asia researcher who focuses on Human-Computer interaction.

Stefan Agamonlis is currently an assistant director of the Rebecca D. Considine Research Institute but previously he worked as the chief executive and research director of Distance Lab in Scotland.

Jennifer G. Sheridan is currently the director of User Experience at Big Dog Interactive.

This paper was presented at UIST 2010

Summary

Hypothesis

The main idea behind this paper was that they wanted to see if an activity like "social jogging" would enhance the activities experience and to see if a "technologically augmented social exertion activity" would be possible or worth the design.

Methods

The system that the researchers created was composed of a small headset that participants would wear that was attached to a small cellphone and a heart rate monitor. While a participant would run, they would be able to talk to their running partner over the phone through the mic. However, they also added an additional social experience by the addition of the heart rate monitor. Before racing, participants were asked to set their target heart rate. The closeness of the person's voice to the other person was tied to their heart rate. For example, if partner A was currently at half their target heart rate and partner B was at their target heart rate, partner A would sound like he was behind to partner B and partner B would sound like he was ahead to partner A. This gave the participants a sense of who was "ahead or behind."

There were three different main design elements the researchers attempted to include: Communication Integration (allowing the joggers to talk while running despite location), Virtual mapping (allows the joggers to tell who is in front and who is behind), and Effort Comprehension (due to the heart rate monitor contributing to the virtual mapping, one can tell how they're personally doing).

Results

To test this system, they had 17 participants go on runs that used the Jogging over a Distance system. In the paper they reported on 14 different runs. The participant's locations varied from Australia to Germany. All participants also knew each other before running as well.

Most of the feedback was very positive. Participants enjoyed being able to talk to their partner while jogging despite being far away. They also enjoyed the fact that the virtual spatial mapping was tied to target heart rate. They cited the fact that normally they can't run with one of their partners due to having different target heart rates and thus running at different paces never worked.

Discussion

Exertion "games" like Jogging over a Distance are, in my opinion, extremely interesting. For me personally, jogging can sometimes be a pain. Running on the treadmill can often be boring and running by oneself outside isn't also that fun either. You often times don't go as far as you usually can if you run by yourself. These types of exertion games make it easier to forget about the work associated with running. 

I think they did a great job proving that their system worked by letting the participants freely use the system. Through this they got some very constructive feedback and it let the participants use the device how they personally wanted to use it.