Paper Reading #9: Jogging over a Distance between Europe and Australia

Reference Information
Jogging over a Distance between Europe and Australia
Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Frank Vetere, Martin R. Gibbs, Darren Edge, Stefan Agamanolis, Jennifer G. Sheridan
Presented at UIST'10, October 3-6, 2010, New York, New York, USA

Author Bios

• Florian 'Floyd' Mueller was affiliated with the University of Melbourne Interaction Design Group, Microsoft Research Asia, the United Kingdom's Distance Lab, and the London Knowledge Lab. He is now a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford with a PhD from the University of Melbourne.

• Frank Vetere is a professor in the University of Melbourne Interaction Design Group, but also has many strictly sociological papers. He was Mueller's PhD advisor.

• Martin R. Gibbs is a lecturer with the University of Melbourne Interaction Design Group and has a PhD in sociology. One of his research projects involves studying social interactions in World of Warcraft.

• Darren Edge works in Microsoft Research Asia's Human-Computer Interaction Group. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge's Rainbow Group.

• Stefan Agamanolis was the Chief Executive and Research Director of Distance Lab, but currently is the Associate Director of the Rebecca D. Considine Research Institute at Akron Children's Hospital. He has a PhD from MIT's Media Lab.

• Jennifer G. Sheridan was with the London Knowledge Lab, but currently is the Co-founder and Director of BigDog Interactive, which develops interactive applications. She holds a PhD from Lancaster University.

Summary
Hypothesis
Can runners in different areas have the social experience of running together through spatialized audio? How do you design a technologically-augmented social exertion activity?

Methods
The authors interviewed participants after 14 paired runs using Jogging over a Distance. The pairs already had some social connection to their partner. Most of the tests were cross-continent, though one took place on a single track. A coding process was used to identify common themes.

Results
Initial findings suggested that users enjoyed using Jogging over a Distance more than jogging with a physically present person, due to the percentage heart rate as the determinant of position. The integration of communication encouraged users to exert similar efforts if they wanted to talk to the other person. Users also picked up on the breathing of their partner, though inquiries about who was in front were frequent. Users could comprehend their effort level, rather than performance, though the measure of exertion can produce relatively unintuitive results for a race's winners. The system could also virtually map exertion into a shared digital representation, which users considered similar to a handicap in golf.

Contents
Most current systems that make exercise social measure user performance as a competitive score after the completion of some exercise.The authors proposed a work that shares this sort of data as it is collected in real-time and integrates with advances in networking to simulate exercising together. Their system, "Jogging over a Distance", sends audio from a headset in real-time through a spatialized channel to give the illusion of being in a position relative to another runner. Their position is based on the user's percentage of target heart rate, to allow more people to run together. Jogging over a Distance uses a mobile phone and a heart rate monitor to facilitate communication. It does not display data while running to reduce distractions.

The ability to talk with another is part of the communication goal as well as possibly conducive to a runner's health. For this paper, though, the authors chose to explore only the user experience aspect of a social exertion system, as this is a step in a multi-stage investigation of user experiences. While Jogging over a Distance has been revised multiple times, this paper is based off their latest revision to date.

The design recommendations for a social exertion system can focus on the themes the authors noted for Jogging over a Distance, but each theme has its drawbacks. The authors argued that communication integration must be balanced between a high and a low point based on the designer's intentions. Effort comprehension can entail traditional measures, like goals scored, or more unusual ones, like heart rate alone, to give users a better kinetic understanding. Virtual mapping of bodily investments to a sort of digital event, like leveling up or relative position, can vary in its level of detail. Coarseness tends to suit beginners better, though the authors suggest dynamic difficulty balance.

Discussion
The authors found that Jogging over a Distance, at least in the short term, encouraged participants to run together and had some distinct advantages above normal running. The numeric data was necessarily limited, as the goal of this study was to gain qualitative data. Nonetheless, the overwhelming success of the system with its test users convinced me that this system is viable.

This is particularly interesting technology to me because I prefer to not jog alone, and this would allow a greater diversity of partners. Also, the authors produced a more generalized set of design considerations to encourage more work in the area, which I appreciate.

The biggest flaw I could find is that the system relied on both voice and data access. For those of us with less-than-stellar cellular service, this technology is all but unusable.