Development of a Virtual Group Walking Support System

Recently, we often see the people walking around both in the town and countryside with their friends for health keeping in the morning and evening in Japan. Most of them make a group for walking. One of the reasons why they make a group for walking is that group walking helps them to continue the exercise. But, sometimes they can't exercise out of their houses because of weather condition, for example, the rain, snow and so on. Then, they have exercise machine, for example, stepper and walking machine in their home. However, it is hard to keep motivation to exercise alone at home. From this viewpoint, the cycling machine with display, which offers a virtual space and avatar that supports the users exercise, has been developed (IJsselsteijn et al., 2004). In this research, we have proposed the walking system for health keeping with partners using shared virtual space through the Internet. The system consists of a computer connected to the Internet and a sensor for extracting the user's motion. The proposed system can provide the moving images and footsteps based on the user's step to the users. And in the case of paired use, the voices, motions and footsteps are sent to each other.