Background and Rationale
Virtual exercise environments (VEEs) hold great potential for increasing participation and promoting greater adherence to regular physical activity. As such, they are a major development focus in the RecTech approach to promoting healthy, active lifestyles for people with disabilities. One key element in allowing geographically distant people to share a VEE experience is having a common way for their various exercise devices to access content and share information. The currently available choices for permitting such access and sharing involve restrictions to a specific platform (i.e., using a specific game console), a specific game engine (i.e., a particular multiplayer online game such as WarCraft or CounterStrike), or subscribing to a proprietary service and using compatible equipment (i.e., FitLinxx, NetAthlon). This project will develop an open source language designed specifically for the creation and support of VEEs and VEE oriented gaming. Since the vast majority of multiplayer online games are not oriented toward physically active player participation, our focus does not duplicate or directly compete with these existing systems. Rather, it provides the basis for a new generation of VEE-oriented applications accessible to people with disabilities and designed to promote cooperative, collaborative, or competitive physical activity through networked exercise equipment.
This fact sheet was last updated on 01-11-2008.
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