Duel Reality

A digital sword-fighting game, controlled by your heart rate.

type
research project
year
2012
links
project page
team
Alan Chatham, Harry Lee, Chad Toprak, Eric Dittloff
role
project lead, concept, implementation
result
Presented at conference Interactive Entertainment 2013

Summary

Duel Reality is a digitally enabled sword-fighting game. It explores how we could create compelling exertion gameplay by intentionally hiding biofeedback and other forms of real-time body data from the players, but not their opponents.

How it works

In our game the data coming from a body sensor (think heart rate sensors etc.) determines where the opponent should hit you. However, you do not see this information yourself, so you will have to observe your body to figure out what your body is doing. If players had perfect knowledge of this data, they could easily defend themselves. However, since a player has no direct feedback from the sensors, their defense is weakened by their imperfect knowledge.

Making the prototype