Playful (Persuasive) Toothbrush
Despite the skepticism when Jesse Schell explored hypothetical scenarios such as teeth brushing earning sponsored awards from Crest, here is an example of Playful (Persuasive) Toothbrush by students Yu-chen Chang, Chao-ju Huang - Via: iCare Research Projects.
It is about a playful toothbrush to assist parents in motivating and getting their young children into a habit of proper and thorough tooth brushing. The system includes a vision-based motion tracker that recognizes different tooth brushing motions, and a fun tooth brushing game in which a young child helps a cartoon character clean its dirty virtual teeth by physically brushing his/her own teeth.
Reflections on Jesse Schell’s Superb Presentation at DICE 2010: Design Outside The Box
Jesse Schell’s talk, at a DICE Summit session in Las Vegas last week, went far beyond an entertaining delivery from a CMU Professor: it may well represent a “stake in the ground” for game designers getting sensitive to the magic behind trend-changers and the rising of new core values for game creation, amongst them:
• The perceived entertainment value (approached by Jesse in the context of “Psychological Tricks”, derived from changes in the real-world physique);
• The value of "realness" (when Jesse challenges game makers obsessed over creating fantasy as a disconnect);
• The value of rewarding game-life achievements (please find also Ian Bogost’s recent post: On the Achievementalization of the World).
• The value of embedding games in our everyday lives (which Jesse translates into “a world of opportunity for game designers).
And here is the anecdotal evidence:
Playful (Persuasive) Tray
by students Tung-yen (Dori) Lin, Jen-hao (Arthur) Chen, Keng-hao Chang, Shih-yeh Liu
It is an interactive, persuasive game built into an ordinary food tray to assist parents to improve dietary behaviors of their young children. The persuasive game is played over a playful tray. By eating from the playful tray, a child can see his/her favorite cartoon character being colored or running in a race. The playful lunch tray incorporates both the context-awareness (of pervasive computing) and the persuasive media (of persuasive computing), enabling the creation of a smart object that is not only aware of human behavior but can also influence and shape human behaviors through their natural interactions with the object.
Nutrition-aware Kitchen
by students Pei-Yu Peggy Chi, Jen-Hao Chen
This work is a nutrition-aware kitchen with UbiComp technology to improve home cooking by providing calorie awareness of food ingredients used in prepared meals during the cooking process. The kitchen has sensors to track the number of calories in food ingredients, and then provides real-time feedback to users on these values through an awareness display.
Diet-aware Dining Table
by students Keng-hao Chang, Shih-yen Liu, Tung-yun Lin, Cheryl Chen
It is a dietary tracker built into an ordinary dining table. It is a "smart" dining table that is "aware" of our natural eating behavior. It can automatically track what and how much we eat from the tabletop surface. The goal is to provide users with information about their eating patterns, therefore, help them sensible and healthy eating. The dining table is augmented with two layers of weighting and RFID sensor surfaces to detect and recognize multiple, concurrent person-object interactions occurring on the table.
The dashboard of the Ford Fusion shows how fuel efficient the driver is operating the vehicle with a vine on the right-hand side that grows and withers