Paper Reading #9: Jogging over a Distance between Europe and Australia

Reference Information

Jogging over a Distance between Europe and Australia

Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Frank Vetere, Martin R. Gibbs, Darren Edge, Stefan Agamanolis, Jennifer G. Sheridan

Presented at UIST'10, October 3-6, 2010, New York, New York, USA

Author Bios

•  Florian Mueller was affiliated with the University of Melbourne Interaction Design Group, Microsoft Research Asia, the United Kingdom's Distance Lab, and the London Knowledge Lab. He is now a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford with a PhD from the University of Melbourne.

• Frank Vetere is a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.  His research interests are in HCI and Interaction Design and he works with colleagues in the Interaction Design Group to investigate the role and use of emerging Information and Communication Technologies

• Martin R. Gibbs is a lecturer with the University of Melbourne Interaction Design Group and has a PhD in sociology. One of his research projects involves studying social interactions in World of Warcraft.

• Darren Edge works in Microsoft Research Asia's Human-Computer Interaction Group. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge's Rainbow Group.

• Stefan Agamanolis was the Chief Executive and Research Director of Distance Lab, but currently is the Associate Director of the Rebecca D. Considine Research Institute. He has a PhD from MIT's Media Lab.

• Jennifer G. Sheridan was with the London Knowledge Lab, but currently is the Co-founder and Director of BigDog Interactive, which develops interactive applications

Summary

Hypothesis

Jogging and other physical activities can be made more enjoyable with the ability to communicate with other people anywhere in the world.

Methods

The authors interviewed participants after 14 paired runs using Jogging over a Distance. The pairs already had some social connection to their partner. Most of the tests were cross-continent, though one took place on a single track. A coding process was used to identify common themes.

Results

The study showed that jogging over distance can in fact facilitate social interactions and experience.People were impressed by the feeling it created that they were jogging side by side. The ability to be in communication at all times was beneficial as a security option when people had to jog during the nights. The results about the persons' performance provided information about persons running abilities and how they parred with their counterparts. It helped them to push themselves to their limits and compete.

Contents

In this paper the authors state that jogging can be a good social activity, but that sometimes people who would like to jog and chat are restricted by their physical distance from each other.  The author notes that physical activity can provide an excellent means of bonding and developing relationships, so it would be useful for people to be able to communicate with each other while they are exercising.  It is important to note that the paper focuses more on how to communicate and make the exercise enjoyable, not on how to improve actual physical performance.

Discussion

The authors found that Jogging over a Distance, at least in the short term, encouraged participants to run together and had some distinct advantages above normal running. I liked this study as I have been an off again off again avid runner, and although I  normally run alone I am more motivated and more likely to run if I know there is someone else to keep me accountable. I do think they could enhance the study with visual augmented reality.