A dance game and fitness app that helps bring fun into being physically active.
How many of us commit to the recommended daily quota of 60 minutes of exercise? By combining the fun of dance with the encouragement of game mechanics, MOOVE is a dance and fitness app that incentivizes people to get up, be active, and reinforce that habit to benefit their health.
Being able to stay motivated to be active can be considered a chore for many people; gym workouts are too mundane, while on the other hand, participating in sports or classes can be costly. There are some forms of fitness experiences that are engaging, but even those require expensive extra equipment in order for people to access them, making many options inconvenient and accessible for people. But what if there was a way to have fun while getting your daily hour (or more) of physical activity from a device that you might already own? Dancing is a great form of exercise because it not only requires our whole body to move to follow the moves, but it also challenges our brains to react to timing in music in order to follow a choreography successfully. By combining dancing with game mechanics, the positive feedback and progression skills and physical improvements would help motivate players to exercise and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment as they continue to improve their health and dancing. As a result, it can help boost people's morale, their life longevity, and their connectivity with others by engaging in this fun social activity with other people interested or involved in the dance community.
In order to understand what people are interested in with an application like this, I plan on surveying people's thoughts on exercise and what makes them motivated/demotivated to pursue healthy, consistent habits with staying active. I also plan on surveying people's opinions on dance and conduct research on in-game user interfaces and interactions when playing rhythm and dance games in order to understand how to design game mechanics.
MOOVE is a dancing game app with fitness recording features designed to encourage people to be active daily by showing the collection of improvement on your body when exercising over time. It creates a friendly and fun atmosphere using gaming and dancing as it's main mechanics with the game portion of the app being controlled using motion tracking through the phone camera and requiring players to move in sync with the given choreography cues in order to earn points and aim for high star scores. On top of that, the phone camera is also used in the app to perform body scanning in order to measure certain analytics of your body. Limiting the functions to what is available from a phone helps make these functions accessible to people because it doesn't require extra equipment or purchases to use the app to its fullest and makes it convenient to bring the game around.
Designer
Linh Hoang
Chang Kim—Primary Advisor
Graphic Design Professor, SJSU
Jeong Kim—Secondary Advisor
UI/UX Instructor, SJSU
Peter Piczon—Tertiary Advisor
Dance Teacher, On One Studios
