Creating helpful and motivating motion games for active breaks in a sedentary work environment

Abstract: One major issue that office workers face in their daily lives is a large amount of sedentary behavior. To help alleviate this, researchers at Linköping University are developing a collection of motion games to create natural and motivating active breaks named Liopep. This thesis presents the development and evaluation of one new game being added to Liopep called BoatSim. In BoatSim, the player makes real rowing motions in front of a web-camera to row a virtual boat between various islands, where they can grow crops, raise cows, etc. BoatSim was created in the game engine Godot, with a motion controller powered by Mediapipe Pose. The game was evaluated by repeated playtesting where data was gathered to determine how much movement was achieved by a player interacting with the various different parts of the game, and comparing these to each other.