Stefan Göbel

Technische Universität Darmstadt | TU · Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM)

Gamification is increasingly successful in the field of education and health. However, beyond call-centers and applications in human resources, its utilization within companies remains limited. In this paper, we examine the acceptance of gamification in a large company (with over 17,000 employees) across three generations, namely X, Y, and Z. Furth...

BACKGROUND Many studies have shown a direct relation between physical activity and health. It has also been shown that the average fitness level in western societies is lower than recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). One tool that can be used to increase physical activity for individual people is exergaming, i.e., serious games that...

Training of different scenarios is essential to prepare emergency services for real-world situations. In this paper, we introduce a virtual reality (VR) simulator specifically designed to enhance the training of police officers in the context of apartment search and area securing, including the evaluation of potential threats or hazards. At this po...

The introduction of the Direct3D 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs has caused a big shift in how video games are developed. However, this shift has also brought about significant challenges, including increased complexity in graphics development and difficulty in supporting lower-end platforms like web browsers and older Android devices. As a result, man...

The sense of presence, characterized by the feeling of “being there,” plays a crucial role in virtual reality (VR) to enhance involvement and engagement. While previous studies have examined the effects of sound or music on presence by manipulating auditory cues, little research has explored the effects of personalized music within virtual environm...

In javelin throw, a discipline of athletics, the analysis and correction of throwing technique are essential components of training and competition and fundamentally contribute to the performance improvement of athletes. Motion analysis tools are sometimes used to support coaches, who may easily miss crucial details of the throwing movement due to...

Stakeholders in vocational training are required to provide appropriate learning opportunities that can be used to develop the needed skills induced by technological change and thereto affected changes in the type of jobs, skill needs, activities, and other economic effects. In light of this, serious games have enormous poten­tial, as they can simu...

In recent years, sports and fitness apps have become increasingly popular. In a 2018 survey, 60% of respondents aged 18–69 years old reported using a fitness app several times a week [1]. Moreover, it is expected that the use of these offers will continue to increase in the future. By 2024, 18.3 million users are predicted to use the service. Due t...

More and more digital experiences, such as Serious Games, rely on gesture control as a means of natural human communication. Therefore we investigated the suitability of the Senso Glove: DK2 data glove and a Support Vector Machine for recognizing static hand gestures of the popular game Rock-Paper-Scissors in a previous work. Building on this, we n...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234858.].

In this chapter, the topic of evaluating learner experience in serious games is discussed with respect to four different dimensions: gaming, learning, using and context with a special focus on using multimodal data. After reviewing relevant research fields, the steps involved in a serious games evaluation process is investigated and relevant evalua...

Regular physical exercise is essential for overall health; however, it is also crucial to mitigate the probability of injuries due to incorrect exercise executions. Existing health or fitness applications often neglect accurate full-body motion recognition and focus on a single body part. Furthermore, they often detect only specific errors or provi...

Cybersickness (CS) is a term used to refer to symptoms, such as nausea, headache, and dizziness that users experience during or after virtual reality immersion. Initially discovered in flight simulators, commercial virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD) of the current generation also seem to cause CS, albeit in a different manner and seve...

Quantifying the quality of upper limb movements is fundamental to the therapeutic process of patients with cerebral palsy (CP). Several clinical methods are currently available to assess the upper limb range of motion (ROM) in children with CP. This paper focuses on identifying and describing available techniques for the quantitative assessment of...

To ensure health benefits and prevent injuries, the correct execution of fitness exercises is essential, particularly when vulnerable individuals are involved, such as during rehabilitation. As it is difficult for a person to assess the execution quality for themselves and most people cannot afford a personal trainer at all times, an automated asse...

Training approaches in traditional sports are usually extensively documented. In esports and competitive gaming in general, the documentation regarding tactics and methods players can utilize to improve one’s skill and thus be a successful player is lacking. To assess and compare the training possibilities in competitive gaming, we systematically s...

Today, about 72 million people worldwide are speaking sign language. Since many deaf people are also dumb, they cannot communicate with hearing people through spoken language, even if they can lipread. But sign language is difficult to learn, and more than 300 different sign languages in the world make things even more challenging. Therefore, to su...

Hand gestures play an important role in human communication, particularly when auditory communication is limited. Akin to speech recognition, hand gesture recognition can therefore be a useful tool to facilitate communication and for more immersive computer interaction. In this paper, we examine the mobile recognition of hand gestures using data re...

Along with the high popularity of location-based games in the mid-summer of 2016 caused by the release of Pokémon GO, tool-assisted gameplay rose in demand in order to increase the individual player’s performance within the game. The location-based accumulation of Pokémon presents the continuing challenge for players to expand their collection. As...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Joint International Conference on Serious Games, JCSG 2021, as virtual event, in January 2022. The 17 full papers presented together with 3 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 28 submissions. JSCG 2021 is dedicated to serious games and its interdisciplinary characteristics...

Objective The goal of this article is to present and to evaluate a sensor-based functional performance monitoring system. The system consists of an array of Wii Balance Boards (WBB) and an exergame that estimates whether the player can maintain physical independence, comparing the results with the 30 s Chair-Stand Test (30CST). Methods Sixteen par...

Microtransactions, in the form of loot boxes, are items in a digital game, bought with real money that contains semi-randomized content. They are a commonly used concept for monetarization in current games that are also often free to play. When purchasable items give players a decisive advantage in a game, people often call it pay-to-win: competiti...

In recent years, non-traditional input devices for digital games and applications such as wearable sensors have become increasingly available and affordable. Electromyography (EMG) promises some unique advantages over traditional input devices such as keyboards or gamepads by collecting input data directly at a person’s muscle. As long as the corre...

Serious games are digital games that have an additional goal beyond entertainment, e.g., educational games can be a motivational tool for teaching or training players. Among other things, educational games can also be used in IT companies to convey approaches of agile software development. Such learning environments can improve the player’s skills...

Pervasive games have increased in popularity with the rise of location-based games, but their content quality varies based on the area it is played in. We present a system of anchoring street signs into an approach based on augmented reality, allowing a game being played in all rural and urban areas without the need for custom content creation. By...

Objective: The goal of this article is to present and evaluate a sensor-based falling risk estimation system. The system consists of an array of Wii Balance Boards (WBB) and an exergame that estimates if the player is at an increased falling risk by predicting the result of the 30 Second Sit-To-Stand Test (30CST). Methods: 16 participants recruited...

Objective: The goal of this article is to present and evaluate a sensor-based falling risk estimation system. The system consists of an array of Wii Balance Boards (WBB) and an exergame that estimates if the player is at an increased falling risk by predicting the result of the 30 Second Chair-Stand Test (30CST). Methods: 16 participants recruited...

Objective: The goal of this article is to present and to evaluate a sensor-based functional performance monitoring system. The system consists of an array of Wii Balance Boards (WBB) and an exergame that estimates whether the player can maintain physical independence, comparing the results with the 30 Second Chair-Stand Test (30CST). Methods: Sixte...

Erratum zu:Neue Dimensionen der Mobilität „Der Name des Erstautors im Beitrag „Förderung von umweltfreundlcihen Verkehrsmitteln durch Gamification und Serious Games“ lautet Andreas Gilbert.“

UNSTRUCTURED Serious games are digital games that have an additional goal beyond entertainment. Recently, many studies explored different quality criteria for serious games, including effectiveness and attractiveness. Unfortunately, the double mission of serious games, i.e., simultaneous achievement of intended effects (“serious” part) and entertai...

Serious games are digital games that have an additional goal beyond entertainment. Recently, many studies have explored different quality criteria for serious games, including effectiveness and attractiveness. Unfortunately, the double mission of serious games, that is, simultaneous achievement of intended effects (serious part) and entertainment (...

Im Verkehrssektor ist der Straßenverkehr mit 81,8 % der größte Energieverbraucher (Stand 2010, gemessen am Primärenergieverbrauch). Werden die Emissionen der einzelnen Verkehrsträger im Straßenverkehr betrachtet, so wird deutlich, dass der Pkw die meisten Emissionen (Treibhausgase und Feinstaub in Gramm pro Personenkilometer) emittiert. (Richter 20...

Im Paper wird die Entwicklung von Qualitätsbereichen für hochqualitative Serious Games skizziert. Qualitätsdimensionen und relevant Qualitätsaspekte für die Kernelemente Serious Part, Game Part, Passung und Technologie werden am Beispiel von Exergames verdeutlicht.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th Joint International Conference on Serious Games, JCSG 2020, held in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, in November 2020. The 19 full papers presented together with 3 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers offer a wide range in the use of serious games in several f...

This paper presents the design and development of "StoryPlay Multimodal", a mobile multimodal analytics platform for the evaluation of Serious Games. It is intended to serve researchers, teachers and educational game developers as a means to assess their Serious Game Design. This is done by capturing, pre-processing, synchronizing and visualizing m...

The ubiquity of smartphones with a plethora of sensors made it possible to develop context-based pervasive games playable by most people without any additional equipment required. However, popular games like Pokémon GO or Zombie, Run! show the minimal influence context has on the gameplay besides the user’s position. Furthermore, in the context of...

In this paper, we present PDPuzzleTable, our exergame framework for dual-tasking rehabilitation exercises for patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). It is our aim to create a home monitorization scenario for the Leap Motion Sensor together with a specific set of exercises designed for PD, that allows us to follow upon disease progression by inferr...

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) offers an opportunity to immerse oneself into a virtual world and experience an exciting adventure. However, latency between a user’s movement and visual feedback has a big impact on user experience and performance. In this paper, we explore the effect of increased end-to-end latency in IVR applications by conducting...

Objective: The goal of this contribution is to develop a classifier able to determine if cybersickness (CS) has occurred after immersion in a virtual reality (VR) scenario, based on a combination of biosignals and game parameters. Methods: We collected electrocardiographic, electrooculographic, respiratory, and skin conductivity data from a total...

To study whether psychophysiological indicators are suitable measures of user experience in a digital exercise game (exergame), a laboratory study employing both psychophysiological and self-report measures was conducted. Sixty-six participants cycled for 10 min on an ergometer while pupil diameter, skin conductance, and heart rate were measured; a...

Due to recent improvements in virtual reality (VR) technology, the number of novel applications for entertainment, education, and rehabilitation has increased. The primary goal of these applications is to enhance the sense of belief that the user is “present” in the virtual environment. By tracking the user’s skeleton in real-time, it is possible t...

Due to recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technology, the development of immersive VR applications that track body motions and visualize a full-body avatar is attracting increasing research interest. This paper reviews related research to gather and to critically analyze recent improvements regarding the potential of full-body motion reconstru...

Numerous users of Head Mounted Displays develop symptoms similar to motion sickness. This phenomenon i s k n o w n as cybersickness. T h e current standard method to evaluate it is the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ). Additionally, detection by methods such as biosignals is possible, but it requires sophisticated equipment and expertise. In...

Objective: The goal of this contribution is to gather and to critically analyze recent evidence regarding the potential of exergaming for Parkinson’s disease (PD) rehabilitation and to provide an up-to-date analysis of the current state of studies on exergame-based therapy in PD patients. Methods: We performed our search based on the conclusions o...

Games sind die einflussreichste audiovisuelle Ausdrucks- und Erzählform digitaler Kultur. Die aktuell entstehenden staatlichen Bildungsangebote gewinnen daher künstlerisch und kulturell, aber auch wissenschaftlich und ökonomisch eine Bedeutung, wie sie beispielsweise im 20. Jahrhundert Filmstudiengängen zukam. Dieser Band gibt erstmals einen vergle...

Die wesentlichen Verbesserungen für städtische Lebensqualität werden auf Quartiersebene in einem fußläufig erreichbaren Gebiet spürbar. Wir nennen diese Ebene Digitalplatz als notwendige Ergänzung zur Digitalstadt. Die folgenden 5 Thesen sollen zukünftige Forschungsschwerpunkte aufzeigen mit dem Ziel eine digital-gestützte Stadtgestaltung zur Förde...

Diese DIN SPEC wurde im Zuge des PAS-Verfahrens durch einen Workshop (temporäres Gremium) erarbeitet. Die Erarbeitung und Verabschiedung des Dokuments erfolgte durch die im Geschäftsplan genannten Verfasser. Diese DIN SPEC soll das Beschreibungsformat für "Serious Games" definieren. Unter dem Begriff "Serious Games" versteht man digitale Spiele, di...

Background: Low back pain (LBP) is a common cause for disabilities and reduced autonomy in older adults. Exercise therapy has shown to be effective in the reduction of the symptoms of LBP with bridging exercises as a commonly used intervention. Exercise therapy can be supported with biofeedback-based methods in order to further improve motor contro...

Due to recent improvements in Virtual Reality (VR) regard- ing the potential of full-body tracking, the number of VR-based exergames has been increasing. However, such applications often depend on additional tracking technology, e.g., markerless or marker-based. On the one hand, tracking approaches, such as the Kinect device are lim- ited by either...

Serious games and simulations can be used to support or supplement training, especially when training scenarios are too com- plex. With the novel Virtual Reality technology, training can be par- tially replaced and complemented by a virtual environment. This paper focuses primarily on the design of the police training. The requirements for the seri...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Serious Games, JCSG 2018, held in Darmstadt, Germany, in November 2018. The 15 full and 12 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: serious games studies; game-based lear...

Currently, numerous users who employ HMD devices such as the Oculus Rift develop symptoms similar to motion sickness. Recent literature defines this phenomenon as cybersickness, and one of its main causes as latency. This contribution aims to analyze the accuracy of different extrapolation and filtering techniques to accurately predict head movemen...

The ubiquity of smartphones with integrated positioning systems made it possible to develop location-based games playable by most people without requiring additional equipment. Popular location-based games like Ingress or Pokémon Go have demonstrated the public interest in this genre and studies indicate that playing such games has a positive healt...

Cross-platform publishing is a must have in game development. Sophisticated game engines such as Unreal or Unity provide cross-platform publishing capability. Therefore, many developers use these game engines. On the other hand, several game developers also provide their own technology and do not want to become fully dependent on external technolog...

This paper introduces the concept of Sliced Serious Games aiming to improve environment-friendly mobility behavior. The conceptual approach is motivated by two aspects: First, it is proven that Serious Games can help to learn or to change behavior in educational settings or games for health. Second, referring to climate and pollution, there is a st...

The many benefits of Serious Games have led to a growing interest in using them as educational tools. With this growing interest, researchers in the field of Serious Games have been increasingly recognizing the importance of evaluation for advancing this research field. In addition, traditional techniques used for evaluating software fall short whe...

In this contribution, we present PDDanceCity, an adaptive exergame controlled with a USB dance mat or a Wii Balance Board. PDDanceCity includes cognitive training geared towards cognitive enhancement in patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) without or with Mild Cognitive Impairment (PD-MCI) or Dementia (PDD). The game is available as prototype and...

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is an optical technique used to measure the heart rate (HR) and other cardiovascular variables by analyzing volume changes in the microvascular bed of tissue. At the moment, smartphone users can already measure their HR using PPG applications that use the smartphone's built-in camera. However, available applications are u...

Objective: Numerous serious games and health games exist, either as commercial products (typically with a focus on entertaining a broad user group) or smaller games and game prototypes, often resulting from research projects (typically tailored to a smaller user group with a specific health characteristic). A major drawback of existing health game...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third Joint International Conference on Serious Games, JCSG 2017, held in Valencia, Spain, in November 2017. This conference bundles the activities of the 8th International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications, SGDA 2017, and the 7th Conference on Serious Games, GameDays 2017. The to...

This chapter contains an introduction to this book which aims at providing guidance to people who are interested in conducting or dealing with research in the area of entertainment computing and serious games. The chapter starts with defining key terminology. It then illustrates benefits and challenges in this area of research by discussing the dev...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second Joint International Conference on Serious Games, JCSG 2016, held in Brisbane, QLD, Australia, in September 2016. The total of 16 full papers and 6 short papers was carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: health, well-being and...

Dieser Beitrag stellt eine Anwendung zur Fernüberwachung von Patienten (Remote Patient Monitoring, RPM) vor. Mit der Anwendung kann unter anderem die Einhaltung von Therapievorschriften überwacht, eine Arzneimittelwechselwirkungsprüfung durchgeführt und wichtige Vitaldaten gesammelt werden, z.B. Herzfrequenz und Handtremor. Derartige Anwendungen kö...

Computing machinery allows the creation of intelligent, personalized, adaptive systems and programs that consider the characteristics, interests, and needs of individual users and user groups. In the field of serious games, storytelling and gaming approaches are used as motivational instruments for suspenseful, engaging learning, or personalized tr...

Creating entertainment games is always an interdisciplinary effort, and becomes even more pronounced when serious game creation involves experts from a specific subject area or supporting disciplines, such as pedagogy. As these experts can come from almost any discipline, it is beneficial for interdisciplinary work to appreciate differences in appr...

Serious games are fascinating, not only as a popular research field, but also as a relevant economic factor for the prospering game industry. The use of advanced gaming concepts and game technology applied to non-leisure contexts (e.g., education, training, health) is a logical and promising approach, but acceptance by the gaming industry itself (g...

Serious games are useful in a broad spectrum of application domains—ranging from educational games for younger audiences, to collaborative training and simulation environments for industry, or games for health and behavior change. Other examples include games for culture and tourism, marketing and advertising, participation and planning for public...

This chapter introduces the basic subject of this book: serious games. Besides a definition of the term serious game, related fundamental concepts and terms such as gamification, gaming and playing or game mechanics are detailed. Reasons for using serious games and for delving into this subject are discussed. To better understand a serious game and...

Extensive studies show that regular physical activity is one of the crucial factors to determine one’s prolonged health and wellbeing. But although this knowledge is fairly widespread, many people still fail to meet the WHO recommendations for the weekly average of physical activity. While the reasons for this shortcoming are manifold, a lack of mo...

The aim of this book is to collect and to cluster research areas in the field of serious games and entertainment computing. It provides an introduction and gives guidance for the next generation of researchers in this field. The 18 papers presented in this volume, together with an introduction, are the outcome of a GI-Dagstuhl seminar which was hel...

This textbook provides an introduction to the fundamentals of serious games, which differ considerably from computer games that are meant for pure entertainment. Undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines who want to learn about serious games are one target group of this book. Prospective developers of serious games are another,...