Body-map: visualising exertion in virtual reality games.

Virtual reality (VR) games offer potential as a fun and immersive way to get enough physical activity to gain significant health benefits. Currently, there is no established way to describe the type and level of physical activity a person can expect to gain when playing a VR game. Nor is there a way of reporting to a person about the exercise they actually did. To address this, we have designed a visual overview that depicts the nature of exercise an individual actually did. To assess the visualisation, we selected four VR games with very different exercise profiles. We used them in a qualitative study with 7 people, so that we could demonstrate how our visualisation could represent the individual differences in the nature and level of physical activity for each game. Our contribution is the design of the first visualisation to represent the nature of exercise gained in VR games, as a personalised, compact summary of the exertion an individual had in a game.