Exergame

Fitness game,exergaming or exer-gaming (a portmanteau of "exercise" and ""), or gamercising is a term used for video games that are also a form of exercise. Exergaming relies on technology that tracks body movement or reaction. The genre has been credited with upending the stereotype of gaming as a sedentary activity, and promoting an active lifestyle. Research indicates that exergames can produce real improvements in fitness. Exergames are seen as evolving from technology changes aimed at making video games more fun.

The genre's roots can be found in games released in the late eighties, including the Foot Craz, which was the first such device, released for the Atari 2600 in 1987, and the Power Pad (or Family Trainer), released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1988, although both had limited success.Konami's Dance Dance Revolution was cited as one of the first major successes of exergaming; when it was ported from the arcade to PlayStation, it sold over three million copies. In the 2000s, a number of devices and games have used the exergame style to much success: the EyeToy camera has sold over ten million units, while Nintendo's Wii Fit has sold in excess of 21 million copies. By June 2009, health games were generating revenues of $2 billion, largely due to Wii Fit's 18.22 million sales at the time. The term exergaming entered the Collins English Dictionary in 2007.

The genre has been mooted as a way to improve users' health through exercise, but few studies have been undertaken to measure the health benefits. Smaller trials have yielded mixed results and have shown that the respective traditional methods of exercise are superior to their video game equivalents.

Exergaming contains elements that were developed in the virtual reality community during the 1980s. The pioneer in this area was Autodesk, which developed two systems, the HighCycle and Virtual Racquetball. The HighCycle was an exercise bike that a user would pedal through a virtual landscape. If the user pedaled fast enough, the virtual bike would take off and fly over the landscape. Virtual Racquetball tracked the position and orientation of an actual racquet that was used to hit a virtual ball in a virtual environment. This environment was shared with another user equipped with another tracked racquet, allowing the two users to play each other over phone lines. In both systems, the users could wear the VPL eyephones, an early head-mounted display (HMD), that would provide more immersion for the user.

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