Walk2Build: a GPS game for mobile exergaming with city visualization

In recent years public health has become of great concern, in particular the personal and national economic burden resulting from increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Sedentary lifestyles are particularly serious for young people who are badly affected by obesity problems that impact on their current and future lives. In an effort to tackle this problem games designers are designing games aimed at motivating people to take part in physical activities and have coined the term exergaming. This poster presents a mobile exergaming application developed in Android Java and HTML 5 targeting under-active teenagers and young adults. The objective is to encourage users to increase walking by an incremental number of steps each week. This is visualized as an isometric virtual town on a web browser (with rewards for achieving targets) and published on Facebook to exploit social networking in supporting users. This poster will examine the motivation behind our game, design decisions, our prototype and concludes with future plans.