Remote Impact – Shadowboxing over a distance

Remote Impact – Shadowboxing over a distance via Waxy.

Remote Impact is a “Sports over a Distance” game that provides a full body contact experience between geographically distant players. The game encourages extreme physical exertion and, unlike the Nintendo Wii and other console games, it recognizes and registers intense brute force. The physical intensity of the game contributes to general fitness, weight loss, and stress relief at the same time it allows you socialize and create new friendships over a distance in an entertaining sportive way.

Current widespread telecommunication technologies can support generic messaging and business-oriented tasks, but they do not adequately support opportunities for building a trust relationship between distant colleagues. On the other hand, traditional contact sports like football, rugby, and martial arts are well known for their effectiveness in social bonding and teambuilding. Remote Impact aims to provide these benefits to participants who are in different places.

A life-sized silhouette of the remote participant is projected on the interface, which resembles a mattress standing against a wall. A unique sensing system measures the location and intensity of each impact. Players can punch, kick, or throw their entire bodies against their projected opponent, and the system recognizes when there has been a hit or a miss. Players can dodge hits by ducking or moving out of the way, just as in real sports. More points are scored by hitting your opponent harder. At the end of a specific time interval, the player with the most points wins. Players can also talk to and hear each other through a voice connection between the locations.