Exercise Pal Mootchi

Exercise is vital to maintaining good health, but many people neglect to work out regularly or often enough. One reason is the lack of will to take part in physical activities. We believe that interactive technologies can play a role in providing entertaining and implicitly educational mechanisms that will help people pursue healthy physical activities. As an example to our approach we present a mixed reality pet, Mootchi, which will provide users with an emotional incentive for exercising, indirectly acting as a persuasive physical trainer. This short paper outlines our prototype implementation and initial findings based on a design critique of Mootchi.