A natural locomotion interface: Its impact on presence and usage in a social-media charity event for mental health

Video games requiring active participation have become a promising technology in reducing the habitual sedentary time associated with the contemporary lifestyle. Unfortunately, the interface devices for these games often fail to maintain user engagement for sustained periods of time. By increasing the users' sense of presence within the virtual environment through careful interface design, we hypothesise that user engagement can be maintained. This results in continued use and positive health related gains. In this paper, firstly we introduce an interface for providing users with a natural, cost effective means of locomotion in a virtual environment. This interface is based on a modified elliptical walker (that can connect to any game) and facilitates natural locomotion by mapping the player's movement on the elliptical walker to their character in the virtual environment. We hypothesise that accurately reproducing a natural means of navigation through virtual environments will result in an increased presence compared with a traditional keyboard mouse interface and present our experimental results to support this hypothesis. Secondly, we discuss an application of the proposed interface to mental health - a virtual charity run named `Digital Miles' that was hosted and streamed online by the authors to raise money for an Australian mental health organisation. This application shows the potential of the interface to achieve people's fitness and well-being goals through game-play and raise mental health awareness among a wider audience.