Astrojumper: motivating children with autism to exercise using a VR game

Children with autism have shown substantial benefit ult to from rigorous exercise, however, it is often diffic ually motivate these children to exercise due to their us sedentary lifestyles. To address the problem of motivation, we have developed Astrojumper, a stereoscopic virtual reality exergame which was designed to fit the needs of children with autism. During the game, virtual space-themed objects fly forward toward the user who must use their own physical movements to avoid collisions. We can use Astrojumper not only to motivate exercise, but to evaluate the different ways people with and without autism interact with an exercise tool. Preliminary playtesting of Astrojumper has been positive, and we plan to run an extensive evaluation assessing the effectiveness of this system on children with and without autism.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Samantha L. Finkelstein, Andrea Nickel, Tiffany Barnes, Evan A. Suma
• Keywords: CHI 2010, Human Computer Interaction