Solitary Jogging with A Virtual Runner using Smartglasses

Group exercise is more effective for gaining motivation than exercising alone, but it can be difficult to always find such partners. In this paper, we explore the experiences that joggers have with a virtual partner instead of a human partner and report on the results of two controlled experiments evaluating our approach. In Study 1, we investigated how participants felt and how their behav-ior changed when they jogged indoors with a human partner or with a virtual partner compared to solitary jogging. The virtual partner was represented either as a full-body, limb-only, or a point-light avatar displayed on smartglasses. In Study 2, we investigated the differences between the three representations as virtual partners for casual joggers in an outdoor setting. Based on our results, we propose implications for the design of virtual runners as casual jogging partners and speculate on their relationship with human users.